Week in Review: Britain carries on Twittering

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Love or hate it, Twitter looks like it is going to stay with us for a good while as Hitwise confirmed that the micro blogging site experienced huge growth in the last year, which shows no sign of stopping.

The biggest social networks in the last few years were never really about business – Facebook has been seen by some as more of a timewaster than a functioning business tool. Twitter is a bit different – there is definite potential there as a communication tool for employees and corporations, but it’s still very early in the website’s life to make any predictions on how this could happen.

However, IT PRO have picked up on Twitter’s benefits as a news tool for a while now with a Twitter feed available for some time. We're also quite enthusiastic about its capability of tweeting up to the minute news – read our blog post on how Twitter is already a much more useful tool for reading about news than Digg.

This we also saw the end of the Bush years and saw a bright new hope in the figure of Barack Obama. One big reason that he won over John McCain so convincingly was due to the way he managed to build up armies of supporters throughout America thanks to his Internet campaigns and knowledge of the social networks.

He’s a bit of an IT geek, and we analysed about how this could be a big deal when it comes to his future policies and a promised package to reboot the US economy. But at least we know one thing for certain - the US president is going to be able to keep his BlackBerry.

Results came in this week from some of the big players, and predictably most haven’t done so well. Microsoft and Intel have cut thousands of jobs. However, Apple, Google and IBM have managed to buck the trend with some strong profit reports.

The Conficker worm (or Downadup depending on what you read) is still a big concern to business networks around the world, and IT PRO has reported on several cases where it has hit, including hospital computers and very possibly the Ministry of Defence.

This is pretty worrying when you consider that Microsoft had a patch available since last year – is it simply because IT administrators were not doing their jobs properly?

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