Although my Twitter count may not have the numbers to prove it, I started using twitter in July 2007. It was barely a year old at the time (founded March 2006). The cool thing about it is I was part of this micro-blogging boom at an early stage, but the problem was, who was I going to follow and who was going to follow me? *sigh*

As soon as I started to tweet, I added a Twitter plugin to display my tweets on my blog’s header, installed the Firefox Twitter plugin that allowed me to simply tweet directly from the location bar (where you type in the URL), told my friends about twitter, blogged about twitter, and googled: “twitter plugins”, “twitter apps” anytime I started to think if I was wasting my time tweeting since it wasn’t taking off at the time.

Today, its a totally different story. Twitter has become a lot more than simply micro-blogging; Besides being the inspiration of Facebook’s new wall design (which wasn’t popular in the beginning, but just like having to deal with latest versions of Windows, everyone always whines in the beginning but soon get used to it), Twitter follower counts has become a competition for celebrities and media. Take for instance the “Twitter War” between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to be the first to have one million followers. I remember watching Ashton Kutcher, Sean Combs and Jimmy Falon appear on Larry King a week ago talking about this momentous occasion lol

There was a point when I was watching and thought how rediculous this Larry King episode was; they began talking about Twitter and CNN then the conversation got all serious when they started talking about using Twitter for good and helping humanity; Jimmy Falon looked like he was just mocking everyone haha.

Twitter has definitely come along way; I wonder if the founders knew it would ever be this big. I think maybe not, since there’s still a lot of buzz about Twitter’s business model; how will they make money from it? Maybe the founders of Twitter simply knew it had the potential of being something grand and would just have to wait for someone like Google to buy them out just like YouTube.

Either way, Twitter has become this huge web 2.0 platform that people have quickly jumped on to not connect with others, but its become this great marketing platform that has people like super affiliate marketers, John Chow and Shoemoney, using it to get people to subscribe to their feeds and aweber mailing lists which are ultimately used to promote their clickbank products.

The only beef I have with Twitter is the overwhelming amount of new accounts being created to simply promote poorly designed websites. Actually, after I find out I have new followers, the first thing I do is see if they have a website link on their profile and visit it; if the website design is horrible I quickly look the other way.

The great thing about the web is that there’s this huge opportunity to make money. I started making money with Google Adsense in 2007 by blogging and have now started to develop my own products I can sell through clickbank. The problem Im finding is that despite the huge growth, the lack of quality websites being launched goes up at the same rate.