Twitter: Conflicting Views On The Future

Twitter rocks. I love Twitter and I’m not afraid to say it. Twitter is to me today, what blogging was me a couple years ago. It’s newsy, helpful, fills a need and it’s the future.

I don’t put it in the category of Facebook because Facebook and MySpace are completely different social media. Those social networks are meant to form a platform for connecting and gathering and grouping and remind me of a knitting circle. Facebook has been great for connecting me to High School, College, and other friends and family. That’s cool. It’s been helpful with gathering groups online. I like Facebook. It’s functional and good for what it is.

I love Twitter.

Twitter is like the sleek little hot rod of social media. Vroom! Vroom! News comes in flashes from absolutely solid sources. I follow people I respect and these people don’t let me down. They add value in the form of humor, information, and conversation. I have met more people and gotten to know them better on Twitter than I ever have on Facebook.

Still, some people are afraid Twitter is headed for trouble. Dova Spivak worries:

Twitter is still relatively small in terms of users, and most of the content is still being added by people. But not for long. Two things are beginning to happen that will change Twitter massively:

1. Mainstream Adoption. Tens of millions of new users are going to flood into the service. It is going to fill up with mainstream consumers. Many of them won’t have a clue how to use Twitter.
2. Notifications Galore. Every service on the Web is going to rush to pump notifications and invites into Twitter.

Twitter reminds me of CB radio — and that is a double-edged blessing. In Twitter the “radio frequencies” are people and hashtags. If you post to your Twitter account, or do an @reply to someone else, you are broadcasting to all the followers of that account. Similarly, if you tweet something and add hashtags to it, you are broadcasting that to everyone who follows those hashtags.

Oh fiddlesticks! As to the Mainstream adoption by people who don’t know how to use it. Well, they’ll learn and quickly. If they talk about their toe fungus and make it uninteresting, they’ll be talking to themselves. If someone Tweets and no one listens, where’s the harm?

And as for notifications? It’s called blocking and filtering. We have TiVo for goodness sake. Some filtering device will be created the moment notifications from companies become annoying.

Mostly, I think the explosive growth of Twitter is more likely and that it will be a good thing:

Twitter will fuse with other technologies such as GPS on mobile phones, so that people will find themselves communicating with others not just based on topics of interest, or personal links of some kind, but based on where they are sitting or standing right now.

Twitter is very similar to Google in approach: very simple home page with few options. Expect Twitter to concentrate first on rapid growth, before trying to work out how to make money from the service. Expect Google to watch Twitter with huge interest.
Rivals to Twitter

There is a limited opportunity (if taken soon) to develop a rival platform, especially since the Twitter site is (still) so easy to ransack for contacts, replies and so on, from your own account, to import into other applications or platforms. Twitter could develop into an exclusive platform with a near-monopoly position, just as Skype has done for internet calls, and YouTube has done for video.

Twitter was originally linked very closely to SMS on mobile phones – hence the 140 character limit on length of messages. But outside the US, very few phone companies allow Twitter messages without charging. Expect this to change, with special phone deals allowing Twitter SMS to be included (perhaps with limits on numbers of messages allowed a month).

People are going to Twitter for business (I do–follow me at Dr. Clouthier for health related information–also, I’ll probably not follow you back unless you’re a doctor or in the health-related field. Why? Because I want people who look through my follow list and find rock-solid valuable health resources on Twitter. In essence, I’m doing some filtering for the person following me if they look through my follow list). Businesses will use it for customer service and for a more immediate feedback and market research.

The average age of a Twitter user is 35. That is a marketing sweetspot. This is not the High School band kids on MySpace or the college kids on Facebook (although that’s changed, too). Twitter is for grown ups who are busy and need information quickly.

I didn’t get Twitter at first. My account sat dormant for months before trying it earnest. You HAVE to try it. It is a medium that requires on-the-job learning. But the learning curve is small and the benefits great. And then, you’ll find a way to integrate it into your life–like the phone (instead of the pony express), the radio (instead of a concert), the car (instead of a horse). Twitter will replace Newspapers even more so than blogs have because it is more efficient and quicker and then people will follow links to the blog. Twitter will be the filter. More specifically, the people who you follow will filter information for you. So, how smart or dumb will your filter be?

Finally, Twitter can go everywhere. It’s small and portable, yet rich and complex. The possibilities seem endless and indeed, new Apps are being written daily that make it easier to integrate.

Will Twitter flame out? I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t think so. I put Twitter in the category that blogs were in four years ago. The best blogs rise to the top. The best writers come together on group blogs. Blogs are still here and are growing, consolidating and changing. That will be Twitter.

There are Twitter doubters. I’m sure, back in the day, there were people who doubted the usefulness of telephones, too.

Posted in Nerd Stuff
Tags: Technology • Twitter