04 May 2009 | Commentary & Analysis | James

If this is the first reference to Twitter you’ve come across, surely you must have been living under a rock. Twitter is the new online phenom, the new killer app of Web 2.0.  Breathless gushing aside, Twitter is the real thing, a surprisingly useful and fun tool that has already proven to be extremely popular. And the Twitter wave hasn’t even crested yet. Tech journalist Michael S. Malone has said of Twitter:

The real social breakout – 100 million U.S. and 500 million world-wide users and all of the social transformations that will come in their train – has not yet occurred. Remember the frenzy surrounding eBay when just about everybody you know started buying and selling on it? It’s going to be like that for Twitter six months to a year from now.

Twitter’s not just for fun, but is also now making a splash in the world of big business. Dell recently announced that they’ve moved more than one million dollars worth of merchandise through their Twitter groups. And again, if Malone is correct, this has only really just begun, with bigger things still in store.

So it’s no surprise to find that Twitter is creating jobs. Like the rise of Twitter itself, the trend points towards meteoric rise.

There are 105 new twitter jobs posted on oDesk per month, and 282 twitter professionals.

Many of these jobs are traditional SEO services, simply adding Twitter to the battery of tools which can drive traffic and increase Google page rank. Others are programming jobs, creating automated services that create a tweet reporting activity elsewhere from the web. Twitter’s also becoming a part of other, more traditional services as well. Saying something useful in just 140 characters is a skill, and we’re beginning to see it mentioned in job postings for copywriters. Keeping up with a Twitter feed is also being listed among the duties of virtual assistants.

If you’re already a skilled hand at Twitter, these sorts of Twitter jobs are already available for you. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to add your Twitter skills to your profile so those looking for “tweeters” can find you. Today, mentioning Twitter in your skill set makes sense. Before long, like email before it, aptitude may simply be assumed.