Present.ly I'll Have to Learn to Twitter

I knew this day would come sooner or later--I'm going to have to give up my fear of social networking sites and learn to Twitter. Why? Because with Ruby on Rails developer Intridea's introduction of a similar program for businesses, Present.ly, I'm really curious to know they compare.

Now, most of you out there are probably gasping and giggling (She doesn't Twitter? Where has she been?), but, yes, amazingly, despite the advice of friends and colleagues, I have avoided Twitter. Just to be clear, I'm an equal-opportunity social networking site avoider: I don't have a Facebook or MySpace account either. But the time may have come.

Present.ly interests me. It's a micro-blogging platform designed specifically for business. It's Twitter-compatible. It can be run on office servers or on a host (cloud computing, anyone?). That's incredibly beneficial to large business who don't want to have to figure out firewall access issues. What else interests me about it?

• The ability to create multiple groups (so not everyone needs to know about updates to every project).
• Its portability. You can get those updates via mobile device.
• The price range. Currently, Present.ly has plans that start at free and go all the way up to "On Request" for enterprise use. That makes it easy to see whether the service will work for you or not.

So all of you out there can stop tittering at me. Present.ly I'll learn to Twitter.