Whenever I hear someone over the age of 30 explaining how some new technology or techno-craze is “useless/ pointless/ stupid/ timewasting/ boring/ foolish” etc. I make a mental note to look up that technology and learn more about it. I’m over 30 myself so I’m accepting a degree of techno-fogeydom has creeped into my outlook. I even dismissed twitter as a distracting waste of time. It _is_ distracting but that isn’t the point.
Twitter fulfills a social need. We’re wired for verbal communication and twitter provides us with a convenient way of filling that need that is different in its brevity and reach from other mechanisms. Few enough people connect to those they don’t know personally on facebook but twitter behavior is different. In many ways this is liberating and innovative. By keeping tweets to short bursts of 140 characters we accept a convention that limits our ability to abuse network trust with long and indulgent messages. That’s what blogs are for. When I look at my friends twitter usage and compare it with my own it’s clear that many of us use it to break dunbar’s number. Our casual twitter relationships greatly outstrip the 150 person friend limit that’s more obvious on facebook. Twitter is nothing less than a social revolution. A quick ideas mart… One that, according to Nielsen ratings, subscribers spend a rapidly increasing amount of time using.
Bernie Goldbach makes an excellent point today about how twitter is actually driving the Irish news following an article by Adrian Weckler in the Sunday Business Post. Look at what happened here. The story was brought to me via twitter by one of the country’s best known (and most insightful) digital journalists (whether Bernie wants to be thought of as such is anybody’s guess) and was authored by one of Ireland’s most tech savvy print journalists. The two media working together in harmony as good communications technologies always do.
A new communications technology can be a world beater if it inspires debate, commentary & subscribers over a period of around 30 months after its launch. The reason has to do with stickiness, acceptance & critical network mass. A direct network effect where the value/utility of the network increases directly with the number of participants can lead to exponential growth curves. Take a look at twitter on quantcast to see its traffic follows the exponential-with-limit “S”. Check out facebook figures here. Facebook is in the “low” region of its upward curve 30 months after its founding in mid 2004.
My conjecture is that if you found a company (Let’s call it Ximbo) offering some online social community service and 30 months later you’re still going, taking on more users then you’ve got yourselves, at worst, a niche success. If Ximbo is being talked about in the media after 30 months you’re on the verge of “going global”. Once this happens you may be superceded by a cooler technology or community but you will have left your digital imprint on the minds of those who used your service. Every single journalist who expresses an opinion about your service is just helping you along. No matter how critical or patronising they are, they’re helping you climb that curve.
Who’s doing more to popularise twitter in Ireland? George Hook by using it or Ryan Tubridy by slating it?