Twitter can be easily dismissed as IM-Lite or a tool for people with short attention spans but, interestingly enough, it is also starting to gain traction as a serious communications tool for people to communicate about serious stuff…like politics.
ReadWriteWrite’s Josh Catone has a great post looking at Twitter’s pros and cons, and how it is started to be used even by the mainstream media to distribute content in a quick and efficient manner.
There’s no doubt Twitter has come a long way in a short period of time while its status and image has been upgraded from toy to tool.
The next interesting development will be whether Twitter can take the leap from being a tool used by a small, enthusiastic group of tech-savvy people to the mainstream. At some point will Twitter become as ubiquitous as blogging? Remember, it was only a couple of years ago that blogging was a pretty niche-y activity, while today everyone’s got one.
Another thing to look for is how the Twitter ecosystem will follow in the wake of Twitter’s growing popularity. There’s already demand for plug-ins that will make Twitter more effective and useful. If this area flourishes, it will provide Twitter will another push into the mainstream.
For more, check out techPresident, which suggests “Twitter could be the breakout technology tool of Election 2008″.
More: Speaking of Twitter and politics, the next big test for the platform (technology as opposed to political) is Feb. 5 when Super Tuesday happens. Let’s see how Twitter fares with all the political types pounding out messages as 24 U.S. states hold presidential primaries.
Technorati Tags: Twitter
18 Comments
Do you think that Jaiku will show a more robust backbone and interface than Twitter’s and eventually steal some deluded twitter fans?
I find twitter is more addictive then a GREAT resource. If you add the wrong people or too many people then it can be hard to wade through the garbage and get to the meat of good tweets.
Mark,
You’re absolutely right. My local paper has put out the call to recruit readers to an election-related twitter group. When the group gets traction they even plug the twitter feed into the paper’s online home page.
@Citizent: Doubt it…Jaiku has had problems of its own lately, with the API in particular being down for quite a while. Twitter is just too large a community for Jaiku to catch up over night.
I have enjoyed Twitter for a few months now but thought if I was spending so much time there, I should find a more serious application for it.
I have a community blog and currently there are four different Twitter accounts feeding a Twitter badge on my blog. At this time, the stream content is created and fed by me, is culled from various sources, all with the intent of adding quick information to my blog. I’d love to push this use for Twitter even further.
Any blog readers in my community can create their own Twitter accounts to be added to the badge. Ultimately this one Twitter stream could become an easy and resourceful place to go for information about whatever is happening in town.
It’s only a few weeks old. No clue whether it will ever become the resource I think it could be, but it’s been very cool to push a unique Twitter app.
@Mack D. Male: Twitter has had some serious stability issues over the last few days. So much so that everytime I go to the twitter.com I get a “technical difficulties” page.
Jaiku does have problems of it’s own but right now, it’s more consistently stable than Twitter.
On that note, I would love to see Jaiku become the front runner in the micro-blogs. It’s as simple to use as Twitter but with some better features.
I think the likelihood of Twitter going mainstream is much more probable than other web 2.0 technologies and services.
First, it is very simple and easy to understand. The concept can be explained in one or two sentences. Secondly, and most importantly, Facebook and other social networks have streamlined the process. Because they each have a similar ’status’ feature, the learning curve has been diminished. Education is minimal. People have a precedent with such a tool.
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
@Koby: I know…Twitter is annoying!! I guess what I was trying to say is that it will take a lot more than stability issues for the masses to move away to another service.
It seems the more system upgrades and work that the Twitter team puts in with its host, Joyent, the worse it gets; of course at some point they will get over the growing pains, and might be the first little startup to survive such awful stumbling.
Not a good endorsement for the vaunted and over used indictment of Rails architectures not scaling. It’s probably a case of the database clusters write saturating, and there is no way to buy one’s way out of that with money, server upgrades etc. – a redesign of the real echelon is required, often starting with personnel.
I guess we should be looking out for some management changes/additions at Twitter.
The question is:
Where are Obie Fernandez and Rob Russel when you need them? Someone buy those guys a cape!
Oh that’s right, they are working!
I like Twitter tracking (by keyword) for watching topical conversations.
On of my favorite things about Twitter is when people link to their projects or ideas or cool sites that they find. I’m not talking auto-posting your blog feed. I confess I used to do that and I turned it off a while back. I have never found anyone who has something brilliant in every post and need to spam their followers.
Anyway, the thing I don’t like is missing those cool links. So I made a Twitter Link Monitor. Have a read: http://www.techlifeweb.com/2008/02/01/twitter-link-monitor/
The one question that needs to be asked more frequently is this: Who are the people using Twitter? Spend all the time you want looking for the right business model, examining the architecture to ensure it is scalable, figure out why there are occasional interruptions (OK, this week more than occasional,) but the greatest asset going for Twitter is its community. I have written this elsewhere, but it bears repeating: The tech gurus, like Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Loic Le Meur, Guy Kawasaki, David Weinberger, among others, are daily users. And they are gracious enough to interact with just about anyone. Twitter will succeed because it has the one thing many other startups do not: An amazingly talented and loyal base. Twitter will figure it out.
http://twitter.com/davidbadash
@Mark Evans: They serioulsy need to make it simpler to follow conversations.
Hi also agree that twitter has some great problems. We can add more than 1000 no of followers in twitter in a single day without any problem.
People are misusing it also.
twitter
I was also searching for the similar scripts for some of my clients & hit upon this place for the scripts..
It really helped me a lot..All of my queries were solved by the scripts..
You should also have a look on the scripts, may be useful for you guys..
Get all latest Twitter scripts here. Click the following link for the same
http://scripts4twitter.com/
http://www.gotesting.info/demo/
I came across some of the twitter scripts while searching for some of my clients & hit upon this place. It really helped me a lot. All of my requisites were included in the scripts..
You should also have a look on the scripts, may be useful for you guys..
http://scripts4twitter.com/ourscripts.html
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