Admittedly, I’m only a casual user of Twitter, mostly owing to the fact that most of my updates say things like, “Playing the Wii while I should be doing something adult… like paying bills,” which, admittedly, most of my friends just don’t care about (except for the people who don’t have a Wii… they only take note to ask if they can come over and play). Even as a casual user, however, I can’t help but see the potential in its service, especially for those of us in eCommerce. For those of you not yet in-the-know, Twitter is a service that could almost be classified as “mini-blogging,” enabling its users to post 140 character-long updates about almost anything, anytime. It’s become incredibly popular incredibly fast, and more inventive uses of the service are revealing themselves all the time.

Recently, in the eCommerce world, sites like Amazon.com and Woot have begun using the service to advertise special offers, sending these updates straight into a Twitter user’s e-mail inbox or RSS feed. Imagine how far online retailers could go with this! Custom feeds for items as broad as music, or as specific as “Comedy Central TV Show DVD Box Sets”… Twitter presents a way to deliver a direct jolt to a potential consumer in a manner that very few other tools currently can. Because of this, it’s in a position to be huge for eCommerce in a way that no one was expecting. Think about what Twitter might be able to do for your online business - would it be more suited to product updates or releases? Could it be used to more easily advertise offers? Experiment! From here, the service can only become more popular… integrate into the way you do business now, and you can confidently smile when your competitors are scrambling to figure out Twitter a year from now.