All A Tweet About Twitter
Either you think it's god gift to the mediaverse or you just don't get it, but the digerati is all alight about Twitter. The user-driven newswire, still in its mere infancy, has attracted everyone from Brittany Spears to your grandmother. Now that Oprah has signed on, and the apocalyptic unification of celebs and one-finger-wonders on a 24/7 tweet binge has passed, we have to ask is this the final nail in the coffin of net banality.
When it first arrived and backyard bloggers evolved into tweeter-stars, Twitter beget and sometimes answered the question, can you really tell us anything useful, nonetheless interesting, in 140 characters or less. One million users later we're still not entirely sure because, after all, who's making any money? After signing up for free and perusing Twitter's ad free pages, one immediately joins the guessing game of how Twitter spins a dime from their sky rocketing user ship. The Twitterverse's decentralized news desk capitalizes on the pure human desire to share information, thoughts and ideas. Basic literacy and an ethernet connection is all that's required, and thus it has turned out to be the ultimate telegraph for the masses. And like it's earlier forerunner, it's a game changer.
Now post-twittical mass with a retweet button at the bottom of every blog post, we are in the throes of an unprecedented viral media plague. And while retweets can give any website its 15 minutes, people are still unable to pin a definitive business model on it. Thus we return once again to the foundational question of what is this all good for.
The beauty of Twitter, to the chagrin of all the online marketeers, is your answer and mine won't be the same, nor should it be. Most of us are finding a use for this public newswire in a myriad of ways. Its simplicity has allowed it to be so easily tailored to fit individual needs. My own adoption of Twitter has exposed me to a lot of great blogs and news about subjects I am interested in from people I'm interested in. And more to the point, like minds tweet together in a very timely fashion. Twitter for me is an easy, fluid mix of the personal, random and helpful. However, I was exposed to Twitter a year back by a software development company who used Twitter to get real-time feedback for beta products they were developing. They basically had a free virtual focus group who gave them instant and concise feedback.
The truth is Twitter is no cash cow, and those who approach Twitter purely to milk it as a promotional tool will find the bucket runs dry. Equally,Twitter will be unsustainable for those simply looking to supplement their Facebook friends with a slew of Twitter followers; those simply updating things like what they had for lunch are likely to kill off any longterm interest for both themselves and their audience. Content is and has always been king, and people wise up to widget peddlers and time wasters pretty quick. After the hype subsides and the drop off tallied, Twitter will remain because it asks for something genuine, something you can't find in your wallet or a text book, something you need not be an artist, coder or writer to accomplish and something only you can deliver. Twitter asks for your content contribution, a small idea, link, suggestion, a morsel of creativity or information, and it asks it in the most undemanding way. You have a 140 character outlet to share a piece of your mind, and business model or no that's worth a hell of a lot more than 2 cents.
