Twitter mystery...

It's the twitter equivalent of a pm - personal message.

Yes, I agree with you unless you have a small bunch of followers then it is not a waste of time.

That is VERY odd. It would seem to violate the overriding internet philosophy (which I happen to disagree with) that consumers can reach marketers, but marketers cannot reach consumers (directly).

With some offline methods, I can reach the people *I* choose to reach -- even if they are just sitting there, minding their own business (have made no active effort to search for what I offer).

But the internet seems to be built on a framework where the consumers' privacy is placed higher than the marketers' need to actively reach out to the people he/she targets. For instance, I am not permitted to gather a list of email addr's, and send them an email -- but I am permitted to gather a list of phone numbers and/or mailing addr's, and call or mail to them (yes, minus the people on the do-not-call registry).

This DM option seems to be a bow to the traditional marketing philosophy (which I DO agree with).

It would appear to be an unheralded milestone, if you ask me.

-- TW

[edit] -- cancel all of the above -- one can only DM people who have already *chosen* to follow you. The 'listener' was (still) in control from the start. Oh well. The marketer is once again stuck being merely be the dartboard, not the dart.

It may be too early to dismiss the value of DMs. I can see it being useful to users that would like to quickly exchange private or sensitive information with their friends/followers. This dismissal (not the first time here) may be due to a few aggressive marketers using it to spam their followers with their promotion / affiliate links. In the not too distant future, I envision Twitter users filtering their DMs with help from DM spam filtering tools or even Twitter itself to make DM a more useful feature akin to dealing with spam within their email accounts.