Twitter is a curious social networking site that is a cross between blogging and IMing. When you use instant message, you are typically sending a short note to one person who might respond. When you blog, you are transmitting to a larger audience and hopefully have well thought out ideas that are crafted with some care.

Twitter is neither a blog, nor IM. It is a strange hybrid of the two. After you sign up and log in, Twitter asks you to answer, "What are you doing?" People answer this question through out the day essentially documenting everything from the mundane to the exotic.

Twitter allows you to "twit" from your cell phone or IM client as well so you don't need to be logged into the Web site to set messages.

You can invite friends who can subscribe to your RSS feed and you can subscribe to theirs.

At first blush, this has seemingly no particular worth to a non profit...but lets dig deeper.

1. RSS Feeds allow you to extract content EASILY to another site
2. Short notes don't necessarily need to be meaningless notes
3. You can set up simple badges that can be put into sites that track your commentary.

So think about what you could do with Twitter at an event like a conference, trade show, or concert--any public event would do. You could ask registrants to sign up for twitter and then give short snippets of the experience. They you could pull all these comments into a single Web page as a running testament to the event.

While I'm personally not sure about what Twitter can do for me, I think it bears exploration.

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