aaron evans

Twitter has officially taken off. Even I have a twitter page.

I think twitter really took off a few months ago. In my view, the turning point for twitter’s popularity was the 2007 SXSW Interactive Conference. This conference is a gathering of people who are on the cutting edge of technology and twitter was a big topic. A lot of those people seem to think twitter is going to be big and they should know, right?

In my experience, if you explain twitter to someone, even a technologically savy person, they will basically laugh and say that it’s a really dumb idea. Who wants to hear little snippets of uninteresting chit-chat?

I do and I think that these people will eventually come around on twitter. The gut reaction that people have to twitter reminds me of the reaction that people had to the web or to blogs not too long ago. I think it’s important to differentiate between the medium and what people are saying on the medium.

When the web or blogs first started, you had a bunch of early adopters creating content and it was generally uninteresting to read. How many horrible geocities pages existed in 1996 and how many really bad blogs are still being created today? The turning point for these mediums was when people with interesting things to say started creating content.

So, that leaves us with the question: can you say something interesting in 140 characters or less? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’ provided you don’t try to always say something interesting and you can link to other sites. Interesting people create interesting content on pretty much any medium.

The other point I wanted to raise was the wealth of interesting twitter-derived applications that I expect in the future. Recall that RSS and Atom are the syndication formats that inspired the so-called ‘Web 2.0′ and they allow cool applications to be created by easily accessing the data created by other sites. The missing element before twitter was a really simple way for groups of people to create content to syndicate. Twitter Vision may be the first of many interesting twitter applications; I think it really only scratches the surface or what people are going to think of in the near future.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.