What's the point of Twitter?

So, everyone's a'flutter over Twitter?

I wouldn't count on it.

Here at Finextra we set up our own Twitter feed last year, just as an experiment. To set the ball rolling, we identified all Community members with a Twitter account and started following them.

Over the past couple of months there's been a noticeable drop-off in tweets from individuals on the network, and a pick-up in 'headline spam' from the commercial quarter.

I went back in and checked on the activity of our early birds. More than half had given up over Christmas, and a further quarter were posting in a rather dispiriting and slightly desultory fashion.

As ever, the humdrum reality fails to live up to the excitable media hype.

Back at Finextra Towers we haven't yet made a big song and dance about our presence on Twitter. Like the technology platform itself, we're still finding our feet.

An early mistake was to set up two separate accounts - one for posting news headlines and another for generic comment. This has proved too much of an overhead - and mildly confusing for anyone wanting to follow our posts - so we've decided to consolidate all of our tweets under the generic Finextra brand.

We're also going to resist the easy temptation to overload the page with an automated feed to our daily news headlines, preferring instead to pick and choose some of the more interesting, or time-sensitive, items generated by the public site and community blogs.

By itself, this is nothing to get too excited about.

But there's more to come.

We expect to realise the true value of Twitter in more innovative contexts, starting with our PaymentsLive Webcast next Tuesday. This two hour debate will feature contributions from leading industry experts on the future of transaction banking.

As well as viewing the live video stream, remote participants will also be able to use their Twitter accounts to pose questions to the panelists and hear their responses as they are relayed back over the Web.

So if you've persevered with Twitter but have sometimes wondered what's the point, tune in on Tuesday and let's see if we can harness the wisdom of the crowd to demonstrate the real utility of social networking.