One of the ways in which Web 2.0 can be characterised is by sites which deal with “presence”, i.e. short form communication, which is constrained to bite-sized chunks of information.
Twitter is a contemporary web phenomenon which illustrates the phenomenon very well. Calling itself a “communication utility” Twitter recently announced it has raised US$20.4m of funding. Designed to allow groups of friends to interact via the web, instant messaging and mobile, it has stolen the micro-blogging limelight, and despite its very visible failings and problems scaling, it has become the market leader of a veritable plethora of similar tools, including Pownce, the Google-acquired Jaiku, Plurk, and most recently Identi.ca . All these “Twitter clones” are more noticeable for their similarities than their differences.
Twitter is the daily haunt of an estimated two million people. How has it managed to achieve that level of usage? It’s a free service. It only offers a maximum 140 characters. It doesn’t allow file sharing (like Pownce). It ’s not threaded (like Jaiku). It limits the amount of SMS updates it will send to your phone to 250 per month. And it frequently falls over… Yet, it has attracted the users, and more importantly, the coders, who with access to an easy API have constructed a host of third-party applications from the entertaining (Twittervision) to the useful (TwitterKarma) to the imaginative (TwitterFone) and for every conceivable platform and device.
The fact is that Twitter has become a crowdsourcing application for knowledge - “where can I” “how do I” and “please find me a” are requests more usefully directed to a few hundred “friends” than to a faceless operator working for a TelCo. Twitter has proved a reliable news breaking service, often beating network news by several hours. It’s good for making useful business connections. People have met, got engaged, and even married on Twitter. As a social application, it beats Facebook hands down - less shared information, so more privacy, less distractions, no zombies.
Each of these platforms tends to attract not just the same kinds of people, but the same people. These are typically early adopting, gadget-using, ready communicators, used to screening out noise and often with something to say. As if panning for gold, they sift through the conversations which they monitor, plunging in to extract the occasional valuable nugget, or - and this is most important - providing similar value to their friends and followers. They use the same applications to update them - with Ping.FM or Twhirl (recently acquired by Seesmic) you can send the same information simultaneously to more-or-less the same groups of people on several different platforms at once. If you’re using Friendfeed you don’t need to visit anyone’s website to catch up on anything they might have said anywhere, because the chances are they are feeding everything into a single portal.
Will Twitter retain its dominance? Maybe not, according to Techcrunch, who see the Google acquisition of Jaiku as a stealth “Twitter-killer“. Pownce has a small set of devotees, but it’s scratching the surface of Twitter’s user base - it just hasn’t had the take up. Plurk innovates with its user interface, but annoys by disallowing features until/unless you build sufficient “karma” which makes it too time-demanding. Identi.ca is different because it’s both open source and decentralised - the more servers running it, the better it should become, so perhaps we’ll ultimately have a reliable, flexible tool which we can all use.
Confused as to the value of all this? You should be. Everyone is talking about it.
