by Jenny Ambrozek
March 7, 2009 at 11:01 am
· Filed under Collective intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, Networks + Networking, Web 2.0, productivity
Appropriately via Twitter this morning I found a post by @johnt both marking the occasion of Twitter’s 3rd birthday and making the case for why Twitter is the Killer App.
Can Twitter really be 3 years old? Wikipedia confirms and provides this history:
“Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. It began in March 2006 as a research and development project inside San Francisco podcasting company Odeo.[4] Odeo was co-founded by Noah Glass and blogger Evan Williams. In October 2006, the company was bought out by management, and Williams, Stone, and other Odeo employees started another company named Obvious Corp. to operate Odeo and Twitter, another startup Williams had been testing in the offices for about a year.[5] Twitter had been initially used internally by Odeo’s employees and became a product of Obvious at this time.[6]
The service rapidly gained popularity: In March 2007, it won the 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category.[7] Dorsey, the man behind the concept of Twitter,[8] gave the following playful acceptance speech at SXSW: “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”
John Tropea’s blog post scanning the Twitter landscape and spelling out the case for microblogging as a productivity tool is recommended reading. (The AppGap’s Jon Husband is quoted.) However, the assertion catching my attention was this:
“Most of all it is the perfect example of defining a new generation, away from the economic model of self-gain, and more to a social connection, collective, and engaged model.”
Does Twitter’s rapid rate of adoption and popularity in fact signal the arrival of an economic model based on engagement?
If so, what are the implications?
~ Jenny Ambrozek
Permalink
Thx for probing deeper Jenny…yourself and Jon Husband really focused on the most important part of my post
I think Twitter enables an environment that demotes hoarding, and where sharing is not based just on personal gain, but moreso reciprocation…a place to both seek and offer (give and take)
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So sharing and awareness or a participation network is different than the way information traditionally flows and also a little different to the way markets operate.
My notes are here about the and .
The next question is that this is true of networks, but why the Twitter network as the poster child for this new economic model over other types of networks.
Well I explained that in my post:
- it is not just about publishing, but conversations (different to blogs, as in Twitter a comment is posted as the same level as a publishing)
- publish and converse in the same stream
- like in real life
- overhearing conversations and discovering people
- it’s so easy and responsive
(my questions get answered in minutes by lots of people, which is a vote to use it again, and also reciprocate)
- in the palm of your hands (mobile phone)…very low barrier to participate
Since this is so similar to how we behave daily, it becomes easily adopted.
Just think of your daily offline interactions, and compare that to your online interactions in Twitter
- they are very similar (conversations in an open space, bumping into people, etc…)
- obviously Twitter has all the online benefits of documenting, social graph, recommend, organise, etc…
I’d also be interested in hearing what others think.
Let’s wait and see how Twitter-like tools fair in the enterprise like Socialtext Signals, Yammer, Socialcast….
I can see someone in HR or admin using an internal Twitter to ask and receive, and then perhaps publishing-like posts. But I don’t see as many of these people taking to blogging (much more of a commitment, much more about publishing)
To both John and Jenny’s posts regarding reciprocity in Twitter and the equal level of exchanges is recent research done by HP’s Benardo Huberman and Daniel Romero – Social Networks that Matter: Twitter Under the Microscope. http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/twitter/twitter.pdf
It appears directed messages even though public reveal a close “friend” network within a larger network. There is good data in this research revealing a different dynamic in Twitter. Will be interesting to see further comparative studies with other social tools.
Within the enterprise my guess is a similar Twitter usage pattern would evolve as well. I also imagine that within very large enterprises it will be those with rich combinations of tools where Twitter will enable surfing oceans of people/information producing multiple “networks that matter”.
Victoria G. Axelrod
I’m finding that when it comes to the enterprise, Twitter and Yammer for that matter compete too directly with the email inbox, the intranet and the sharepoint installations. Conversations without the calendaring, email lists and more advanced file sharing capabilities don’t really happen. There’s also the factor of it being yet another interface to deal with. Having said that a lot of my clients are interested in integrating twitter like functionality into the home pages of their intranets. This takes the form of automatic recent activity streams, following co-workers and manual status updates.
8string wrote @ March 17th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
I don’t think that Twitter is moving anything away from “self gain”. The social web simply enhances the normal interaction between people that all of us have had forever, lately with SMS and Facebook, etc. My guess is that Twitter is too isolated a service and will eventually be integrated into other tools, probably sold off to a company that can attempt to make money in it, which they apparently aren’t doing yet. The hype machine is very strong,and in this market, is desperate to make anything look like the next world beater. It took Facebook and MySpace some years to really find a wider niche. In the process they did change to the new audiences they were picking up. Shiv is very right on with the normal enterprise having far too many tools to make great sense of. While I use IM a lot at work, it’s more to supplant the phone. I would assume Twitter would serve a similar function.
My bigger question is this, is Twitter actually being used globally yet? I haven’t kept close tabs on it. Is this service actually taken off in, say China or Spain? Has it made significant headway against the other forms of SMS texting that are far more prevalent?
Victoria, Shiv & 8string, Great minds and comments all.
Extracting Victoria’s:
“networks that matters”
Shiv’s
“the factor of it being yet another interface to deal with”
and Al’s
“social web simply enhances the normal interaction between people that all of us have had forever, lately with SMS and Facebook, etc”
it seems you’ve covered the landscape and Twitter prospects.
And I hope others will address the bigger question about global use of Twitter to which
Alexa.com provides some clues: http://snurl.com/e4tlm.
Twitter’s Alexa Ranking has grown from <4k October 08 to 289 today.
User distribution by country is United States 47.4%; Germany 9.9%; United Kingdom 7.1%; India 6.0%; China 3.1%.
It will be interesting to see how global usage patterns change along with how long Twitter survives as an independent company serving the consumer space.
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