Unless you've been stranded on a deserted island with a volleyball named Wilson for the past year, you're probably familiar with Twitter.  I don’t think I need to detail what Twitter is and does, but in order to fill up this blog post with SEO rich content, I’m going to anyways.  If you are indeed familiar with what Twitter is and does, please skip the next paragraph.

Twitter started as an online dialog and communication application where users connect and repeatedly share short answers, known as tweets,  to the question "What Are You Doing?" in an informal and instant manner.  The Twitter community has since opened the line of interpretation to the "What Are You Doing?" question.  Today, the Twitter community regularly shares information about just about anything - “What’s cool?”, “What’s not cool?”, “What number am I thinking of now?” – it’s all on Twitter.  Basically, if people have something on their mind, they’ll share it on Twitter.

Now back to the original reason why you are reading this:  Should I Twitter?  Yes, you probably should. And you have think beyond using Twitter just to tell your buddies you're hungry and what you’re going to eat for dinner. There are real business opportunities using Twitter.

For one, Twitter is absolutely exploding with new members. Let me repeat that – Twitter is ABSOLUTELY EXPLODING WITH NEW MEMBERS!  In March 2009, Twitter had a growth of 1382% according to a Nielsen.com blog ranking the fastest-growing sites in the Member Communities category for February 2009.  There’s an audience for just about everything on Twitter.

And if sheer volume of members isn’t enough, it was announced this week that Twitter Search is not only going to index and rank tweets in their search ranking results, but Twitter will also index and rank the links to the content within the tweets in their search results.  Twitters’ search results will be one step closer to a search engine serving real-time information.  If something’s being tweet-ed, especially something very 'now' and very topical, you will not only be able to search for but also find plenty of open dialog about that topic on Twitter - and in real time. Take that Google!

If you have brief newsworthy information to share and want to share it right now, Twitter allows you to both collect a captive audience and also provide an outlet to get your message out to the masses, fast.

If you've hung out with this guy, you may not know about Twitter.