Twitter is the latest hype in the world of Web 2.0 and even though some people are highly sceptical about it (even the MIT advertising lab) this service is highly interesting - because it brings blogging to your mobile phone and creates at the same time the chance for an extension of the mobile phone business model.

Twitter is a “A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!”. Sounds complicated - but it’s actually pretty straightforward.

Here is how it works:

You and your friends create accounts on Twitter and you also provide your mobile phone numbers. In the next step you subscribe to your friends twitter account and you will receive all micro posts your friend sends to Twitter. Of course it also works the other way round - any message you send to twitter will be sent to everyone who has subscribed to your Twitter account. So why you need the mobile phone number -cause you can do this from your mobile phone (but also using instant messaging or the web interface).

So basically Twitter is an enhanced version of SMS texting - SMS texting with a broadcast feature, sending one message instantly to many other people. But if the user is sending one SMS text which is then sent to more than one receiver, someone has to pay for these additional SMS texts. And this is where the mobile phone provider comes in.

The mobile phone company should set-up such a system and their customers can subscribe for a monthly fee to the “T-Mobile Twitter”, “Vodafone Twitter” or “Mobilkom Twitter”. This way the mobile phone company can monetize not just on the SMS texts sent (which they will still charge) but also on the SMS texts received (via the monthly fee).

And who should be using this? Teenagers - who are busy keeping their friends uptodate about “What they are doing”. Will they be using this? Just think back about yourself when you were a teenager? Would you want to feel left out about what your friends are doing?

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