Twitter - When was the tipping point and what does it mean?
Okay, its official, but you didn't need to read it here, Twitter is mainstream.
I think the Steve Fry article on the BBC site was a tipping point, certainly in the UK, but at the same time there were similar articles popping up all over the place raving about Twitter and telling everyone to give it a go.
Apparently Twitter is now growing at a rate of 1,382%. This is phenomenal growth in anyone's book.
Since then there have been an abundance of new "Top 100 Twitter Tools", "10 Basic Steps to Twitter Success" and many other similar articles, riding on this new found wave of readership.
So what has this meant to those who were around before this sudden growth in popularity?
Well it depends on who you ask, some bleeding edge technologists have been prophesying the end of the Twitter world, with the quality disappearing with the exclusivity.
Others have been rubbing there hands with glee as their followers jumped from several hundred to several thousand in a very short space of time (calculating their Twitter "value" with an obscure method the Mayans developed for ranking their Twitter value).
To me, it means little. Twitter is exactly the same tool as I was using before the sudden growth. Now, I must point out here, I haven't been using Twitter for several years, as some may claim to. But I have been using it long enough to have witnessed this sudden upturn in its usage.
How has this affected me?
Well, one thing that has happened a number of "real" friends that weren't previously using Twitter, now are. This has added another, better, social dimension to the tool. I actually talk via Twitter about what we might have done over the weekend (although I usually save these chats for Direct Messages, avoiding filling my stream with lots of irrelevant personal chatter).
I've gained a few extra followers, but most drop off after I don't immediately follow them back, which is cool, as we shouldn't be using the interface purely for the sake of just getting as many followers as possible. But I've talked about Twitter and numbers of followers before and how we should seek quality and not quantity.
I might now see more people reading my blog, through the links I post via Twitter, but this is minimal as most of the new following base aren't really interested in social media or digital media as a subject. They are only really interested in the networking gateway it might offer.
Other than this, it's business as usual, as it should be for all users of Twitter. The only thing we should perhaps be concerned about, is that Twitter might not be able to keep up with the new demand on its already floundering resources. Hopefully the new capital injection they recently received might help with this.
Twitter already empowers the user to decide who they follow, in fact you can also decide to block others from following you. Ensuring, that if you wish, your Twitter-verse remains as insular as it always was. Your only additional exposure would be with your posts in the Everyone feed.
I know we all like to feel like we're in an exclusive group that only the few recognise or have access to and it may feel like this is over for Twitter. But there will be something else along soon enough for those that need that exclusivity feeling.
In the mean time, why don't we all continue to use Twitter for what its best at? Sharing ideas and content, communicating with like minded people, instantaneous debate and micro-blogging.
It might be more popular now, but nothing has really changed.
I think the Steve Fry article on the BBC site was a tipping point, certainly in the UK, but at the same time there were similar articles popping up all over the place raving about Twitter and telling everyone to give it a go.
Apparently Twitter is now growing at a rate of 1,382%. This is phenomenal growth in anyone's book.
Since then there have been an abundance of new "Top 100 Twitter Tools", "10 Basic Steps to Twitter Success" and many other similar articles, riding on this new found wave of readership.
So what has this meant to those who were around before this sudden growth in popularity?
Well it depends on who you ask, some bleeding edge technologists have been prophesying the end of the Twitter world, with the quality disappearing with the exclusivity.
Others have been rubbing there hands with glee as their followers jumped from several hundred to several thousand in a very short space of time (calculating their Twitter "value" with an obscure method the Mayans developed for ranking their Twitter value).
To me, it means little. Twitter is exactly the same tool as I was using before the sudden growth. Now, I must point out here, I haven't been using Twitter for several years, as some may claim to. But I have been using it long enough to have witnessed this sudden upturn in its usage.
How has this affected me?
Well, one thing that has happened a number of "real" friends that weren't previously using Twitter, now are. This has added another, better, social dimension to the tool. I actually talk via Twitter about what we might have done over the weekend (although I usually save these chats for Direct Messages, avoiding filling my stream with lots of irrelevant personal chatter).
I've gained a few extra followers, but most drop off after I don't immediately follow them back, which is cool, as we shouldn't be using the interface purely for the sake of just getting as many followers as possible. But I've talked about Twitter and numbers of followers before and how we should seek quality and not quantity.
I might now see more people reading my blog, through the links I post via Twitter, but this is minimal as most of the new following base aren't really interested in social media or digital media as a subject. They are only really interested in the networking gateway it might offer.
Other than this, it's business as usual, as it should be for all users of Twitter. The only thing we should perhaps be concerned about, is that Twitter might not be able to keep up with the new demand on its already floundering resources. Hopefully the new capital injection they recently received might help with this.
Twitter already empowers the user to decide who they follow, in fact you can also decide to block others from following you. Ensuring, that if you wish, your Twitter-verse remains as insular as it always was. Your only additional exposure would be with your posts in the Everyone feed.
I know we all like to feel like we're in an exclusive group that only the few recognise or have access to and it may feel like this is over for Twitter. But there will be something else along soon enough for those that need that exclusivity feeling.
In the mean time, why don't we all continue to use Twitter for what its best at? Sharing ideas and content, communicating with like minded people, instantaneous debate and micro-blogging.
It might be more popular now, but nothing has really changed.
Labels: social media, Social networking, Twitter
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posted by Ed Richardson at
12:57
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