I have to confess that I never understood twitter. I knew it was SMS (short messaging system) based but why? All the buzz on blogs like lifehacker and gizmodo and engadget all talked about desktop applications, or apps for your iPhone or iPad. I tried it a couple of times, but there was nothing I could do with twitter that I could not do better with a blog, or email. Tumblr is simple and clean and effective. Facebook is way more popular to most of the people I know and easier to understand.

But I did see lots of celebs using twitter… Like their one personal PR channel, but I’m not famous and no one really cares what I have to say in 140 characters or less so what good is it?

Then I tried to send a group text to 24 people…the result? A big fat FAIL! That’s what. You can’t do it. Even more depressing, I got myself caught in tech no mans land. I use google apps for everything. Google supports Microsoft exchange format. iPhone supports Microsoft exchange format. So now I have google apps integrated with my iPhone and it rocks EXCEPT I can’t get my google groups to flow through to my iPhone. This means that creating texting groups on my iPhone means I’m buying an app. Sigh… Really?

And then.. AT&T won’t let you send a group text to more than 10 people. Seriously.

And then I learned something about twitter. You don’t need a computer. In fact you can sign up for twitter right from your phone. And it’s simple.

Now I know why 10947462786468618 people use twitter. It’s the network marketing (re pyramid scheme) of communication. If I create a twitter account with my phone. And my friends create a twitter account with their phone and FOLLOW me. Every time I send a text message to 40404 – everyone who follows me gets that “tweet”.

In short, I can create a text distribution network using twitter that is almost limitless. Forget the PC and the apps, once you connect your phone to a twitter account, you and your friends can use it as a sort of public broadcast system. If everyone in the group follows everyone else then it becomes like a public Internet chat room.

That’s some powerful stuff.

I started using it to keep my baseball team up to speed with important information while on a travel tournament and 90% of the parents signed up. So far everyone has gotten my texts and using retweets I can take messages sent to me and I can share them with everyone else. The only thing I don’t like about it, is that twitter is not private like email. At least I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

But for me, I can now see how twitter can be used as an awesome group communication tool. Just don’t tweet and drive.

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So I’ve integrated Twitter into my blog.  Why I’m not sure but I did.

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