It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore Twitter. The ?micro blogging? site has become my primary source of news, opinion, interaction and humor. The platform has been adopted by many celebrities and leading media organisations as a means to reach out to influencers. The power of Twitter lies in a few key elements?it is low on verbosity because it limits updates to 140 characters, allows me to discover people with similar interests, and, it is easy to track what people across the world are talking about.

Unlike Facebook, which I feel is a platform for staying in touch with friends, colleagues and relatives, Twitter has become a network for discovering people with similar interests and staying up to date with news. There is a greater tendency for me to follow people whom I perceive as thought leaders, or who I believe will have something interesting to say. It?s almost like picking a TV show or a channel, based on your preferences. The 380-odd people I follow include entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, brands, sports fans, journalists, bloggers, friends and friends of friends. Because I am also able to access it on the mobile, it has become, I confess, an addiction.

Many of the people I follow update their status several times a day, with links to news of interest to them, often with their own take on it. It is highly likely that I will read the news items referred to me on Twitter. It doesn?t take long for news on Twitter to become viral. To put things in context, imagine the referral power of someone like Ashton Kutcher, a movie star and digital entrepreneur, who has over a million followers. Add to that the propensity to ?Re-Tweet? interesting comments, with one user passing on someones update to his set of followers as an endorsement. A search for ?Financial Express? on Twitter helps identify, in real time, news that the Twitterati found interesting and shared with others.

Conversations and debates often follow such referrals, and things can become nasty. It is important to remember that a majority of whatever is being said on Twitter is in full public view. In the heat of the moment it is easy to forget that Twitter is a very public space. This propensity to vent exists throughout the Social Internet, which has been influenced significantly by anonymous interactions on user forums. That anonymity may no longer exist, but that sense of security (and recklessness) that anonymity allows still persists. At the same time, because individuals are interacting with each other frequently?often taking these relationships offline in ?Tweetups??there is a tendency to trust others on Twitter.

Companies worry about what is being said about them on maverick blogs on the Internet. Unsubstantiated claims become permanent on blogs, and there is no telling whom they would influence. Worse, blogs are difficult to track because there are so many blog hosting sites; in one word, the blogging ecosystem is too ?distributed?, and hence difficult to track and manage. Twitter doesn?t have that problem because it is a single platform with mass usage, and has a powerful search functionality built in. Twitter users often use what they call hashtags along with a status update, so make their comments searchable. For example, the hashtag for the Indian elections is #IndiaVotes09. Because of a recent update that Twitter rolled out, users can even save a search for, say, ?Fake IPL Player? or ?ZooZoos? to regularly track what people are saying about them.

A users Twitter page also displays topics that users are talking about at a particular time, and these can range from ?Good Morning? to Manchester United and even the hilarious trend of users sharing their take on ?Unlikely Movie Sequels?. Twitter hasn?t been without its fair share of issues?the platform used to be down frequently, but that issue has since been addressed. As it grows, it will face the same issues that other social platforms before it?MySpace, YouTube and Facebook?have faced: of misuse and potential abuse. Question is?will it sustain and grow, or like many before it, pass the baton to the next big social media service that comes along?

The author is the editor of MediaNama.com