AJ Vaynerchuk

The following is a response to / highlighting of Stephen Baker’s article in Business Week entitled, “Why Twitter Matters.”

The key question today isn’t what’s dumb on Twitter, but instead how a service with bite-size messages topping out at 140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary.

This is a wonderful point! Anyone who criticizes twitter likes to point out the “sillyness” of some tweets. How about all of the silly applications on Facebook? How about reality television? Every service is going to have certain areas that are less than useful, that doesn’t mean the whole service / application is useless.

Late in April, following one of Twitter’s outages, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote: “I realized that in the last two months a subtle shift occurred: I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.”

Great quote from Michael Arrington of Techcrunch. I feel the exact same way! If Twitter is down I feel like I am out of the loop, I rely on Twitter to keep up.

Dell (DELL), a Visible customer, scouts out the tweets and dispatches its Twittering workers to jump into the conversations. At a conference last week, the company claimed to have boosted sales through these efforts by $500,000 in recent months.

Interesting stat. Even though we already know the usefulness of Twitter for business, it is nice to see a company such as Dell back Twitter in such a way.

Stone avoids details. The goal now, he says, is to raise money, nail down the technology, and grow Twitter until it’s enormous.

Biz and crew know what their doing. It should be very interesting to see how Twitter develops its business model over the next year or so. If I had to guess, the ad model their using for Japan won’t be the direction.

What did you think of the article? Did anything catch your eye?