Twitter is a social networking site to keep people connected by allowing them to send out short messages about what they are doing.
There are two kinds of messages which can be sent through Twitter.
One is public messages which can be seen by all the followers and the other is direct messages which can be sent to the relevant person only.
The use case I will talk about here uses direct messaging feature of Twitter.
I will give a web site uptime monitor as an example.
The goal of an uptime monitor is to warn about the failures of online applications very quickly before the users notice the service outage.
It employs different means to warn the users about the failures of the online applications.
Twitter can be another option for sending alerts about the failures of the applications.
The main advantage of a Twitter message is that it is a good combination of email and SMS message.
Twitter messages have low cost like email messages and it is hard to miss them since they can be viewed by both email and Twitter clients.
Let me explain the use case in more detail.
First thing you must do to get notification messages from Twitter system is to follow a specific "notifier account".
This is a Twitter account used to send alert messages.
All direct messages are sent using that account.
If you do not follow that account you can not get direct messages from Twitter.
After following that notifier account, you have to add your own Twitter account to the notification lists of of the uptime monitor.
Whenever your web site or online service is down, you will get a warning message describing the details of the problem from Twitter.
I discussed here about a way to benefit from Twitter system as a notification agent.
This is a different way of using Twitter other than marketing and social networking.
It may be a very useful technique in situations when you must react immediately.