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After using Twitter for a some weeks now and finding it very entertaining, I wanted to investigate a little bit more in all the possible use cases and applications of this novel medium of communication.

First of all, the apparently huge constraint of limiting messages to 140 characters - which has nothing to do with SMS length - effectively turns out to be a great advantage. Authors are forced to write short and intelligible tweets, but in return, they can expect full attention by their readers - similar to news paper headlines.

My first contact with Twitter was during the landing of NASA's space probe Mars Phoenix on the Martian arctic surface. The Phoenix team had the great idea of using Twitter for writing updates during the landing - from the lander's point of view. Soon Phoenix' Twitter feed got more than 30k followers and it happily continues reporting on its experiments and discoveries. Now many people use Twitter to interact with the science team and ask all sort of questions about the mission and Mars, which Phoenix bravely answers. Probably surprised by the big interest in Phoenix' tweets, NASA set up many more Twitter accounts for other space crafts and experiments, probably hoping to achieve more public awareness and enthusiasm for NASA missions.
Public awareness is not only important for NASA - which continuously needs to justify its existence to American tax payers, but for basically every organization which depends on fund raising from the public. With Twitter's growing user base and thus many potential followers, I think we will see more and more organizations expanding to this new marketing channel, like the American Red Cross already does.
It's no surprise that Barrack Obama's campaign team makes heavy use of Twitter too and has most followers of all Twitter accounts - according to the ranking provided by Twitterholic .

Micro-blogging is also interesting for companies announcing new products or performing tech support - like Comcast is experimenting with. Users of open-source software can stay in contact with the developers and receive instant news about the software, e.g. Adium. Microformats.org is also twittering and keeps followers updated on the Microformats world. Fans of some fancy web companies can have a look behind the scenes of their dream employer.

Another big leap of innovation is Twitter's painless simple integration of SMS messages. Subscribers can choose if they want to receive SMS updates for each of the Twitter accounts they are following. Combined with several APIs and applications for publishing to Twitter, it becomes really simple to quickly send SMS messages to whatever intended audience.
This is particularly interesting for breaking news or for writing software agents. Since the availability of Twitter is pretty much unpredictable, it is certainly not suited for mission critical applications, i.e. you don't want to rely on receiving a Twitter SMS warning you of an imminent warp core breach. But there are many use cases for rather "informative" messages, like weather reports, earthquakes or even simple doorlocks.

So besides being an interesting tool for social connections, party announcements and Epeens, there are many uses out there for Twitter or micro-blogging in general and I am curious about that development in the near future.

The Bad News

Unfortunately, as of today Twitter discontinued sending SMS via their European number. They didn't manage to make reasonable contracts with the cell phone companies here and thus cannot afford sending SMS anymore. This is really disturbing, since one of Twitter's main features is lost, burying many use cases. Some users already lost all faith in Twitter. So we can only hope, this is only temporary and Twitter manages to get agreements with Europe's phone companies soon.