Twitter extends a hand to clueless potential users

Afternoon of July 23, 2009 • David Letterman's comments about Twitter being "a waste of time" earlier this week gave fans of the service a good laugh, but the 62-year old chat show host who doesn't "know anything about the Twitter" actually posed a sound question. When posting a message, where does it go?

This kind of question probably wouldn't even occur to a regular user of the service, but to those unfamiliar with feeds, status updates, live blogging, and the like, Twitter offers very little to grab onto. Getting started is not as easy as it could be.

This is why Twitter will be unveiling a new homepage next week, co-founder Biz Stone said in a BoomTown interview yesterday.

"We need to do a better job of explaining ourselves to people who hear about us and then have no idea what do to," Stone said.

A primary target in this change looks to be the business sector, for which Twitter 101 has been opened, a site which contains resources for businesses looking to use Twitter for their communications.

On the site's blog yesterday, Stone explained, "We coordinated with business students and writers to surface some interesting findings, best practices, steps for getting started, and case studies. The results demonstrate how customers are getting value out of Twitter and suggest techniques businesses can employ to enhance that value."