Twitter is the realization of the term “a little birdie told me”. If you’re not an @somebody, then you’ve probably at least heard about Twitter and tweeting. Some tweet insignificant details of their life. Others are trying to see what they can benefit from twitter as far as marketing their businesses and causes. Can they use it as a tool to make money? I see it as a one up from instant messaging. Instead of sending an instant message to one person, you can message all of your followers or you can choose to direct message someone for more privacy. The introduction of adding hash tags (prefixing a word with the hash symbol, #example) to add Meta data to your tweets and Re-tweets further expand the connections capabilities of Twitter.
As technology advances and we advance as humans heavily interacting with technology, I think that social media sites will either bust or mold themselves to keep going forward. When Instant Messaging on AOL had arrived, your world all of a sudden became a larger place. Now you were able to meet and reach people that were outside of the realm of what is your daily life and you neighborhood limits. AIM is still used today but more as a means of communicating in the office between co-workers and friends, like micro emails. It’s just another sign that humans have already evolved from the social technology of AIM and have moved on to other sites like Twitter.
With the popularity of Twitter spreading, it is now part of our pop culture as another way to connect. Stars, Pro-Athletes, and Mainstream Media are aiding in the growth of Twitter as well. In February 2009, Twitter was ranked as the third largest social site following Facebook and MySpace. Just one month later, they were called the largest growing social site with a growth of 1,352%! The signs of Twitter’s growth and system overload are clear in the creation of their “Fail Whale” that gives you an aesthetically pleasing error message exclaiming there are too many tweets going on.
What is Twitter to do as it keeps growing? Perhaps what most people like about Twitter is how easy it is to become a Tweeter. But should there be more restriction in creating profiles? Should there be more steps in place to avoid inactive accounts? Twitter can consider keeping tweets more local or maybe let their tweeters choose what followers can be excluded from their messages. Maybe a local edition is not a bad idea, even a national edition, and of course international. I’m not too sure what the next idea is but that little blue bird is getting fatter by the day…and what goes up will eventually come down.
For now, Twitter users seem to follow a trend of keeping their twitter accounts. There are not many instances where the users have dropped. The interesting thing is tracking activity levels in accounts. I think the best way Twitter can sustain their growth is to understand why their tweeters are tweeting and why they opened their accounts in the first place. Twitter has already allowed for growth by allowing third parties to create different applications that can enhance a tweeters experience. The biggest flaw I think Twitter has is the abundance of spam tweets. Maybe some like that it’s a free for all for marketing all kinds of things but there should be more of a quality control or filter set in place so that tweeters don’t have to go through thousands of unwanted tweets. This in turn can ad visibility for brands on Twitter to reach tweeters more effectively at the initial point of their interest.
Google has chosen to set local and preference filters for their search engine users, should Twitter do the same? Twitter has been recently compared and contrasted to Google for it’s up to the second search capabilities as opposed to waiting until pages are indexed and crawled by Google. Quite possibly, if Twitter can become the “go-to Search Engine” this will indeed be a strong catalyst for growth, profits and dominant market share.
Melissa Gonzalez @melgonzalez
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3 Comments
Perhaps you want to consider that 60% of tweeters abandon the twitter after the 1st month, due to the total banal nature of the medium. It may be that it was only invented to serve the interests of brand and rumour mill pushers or the millions of clinically bored users who populate it, but for how long?
Thank you for the comment atommedia. I didn’t know the rate was so high; 60%? Well, it makes sense. I probably wouldn’t log in to twitter if it wasn’t so beneficial for work. I’m sure I would have been part of the 60%.
I’d agree, it is beneficial but what a waste of good time when you do it socially, everyone should try going to the pub for a chat.