The last few weeks have been abuzz with coverage of a hot new (ish) Silicon Valley firm and if you haven't heard of it yet you will soon. It's called Twitter.
Twitter is a mobile micro-blogging service (no more than 140 characters) and it is being predicted that it will be a mass-market hit. People who use the service to share their thoughts are called Twitterers.
The service was it was launched a year ago by Obvious Corp a startup headed by blogging pioneer Evan Williams with the idea of offering a simple service that people could use to send text messages to friends' mobiles.
The firm, which is just a year old, was singled out last week by Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive of Sun Microsystems, as a service that had the potential to attract a mass market.The simple and easy to use service will be attractive to existing bloggers and is being seen as a potential replacement for RSS by some.Schwartz says that like YouTube and MySpace, Twitter has the potential to "take off like lightning". Others are more cautious and do not expect it to suddenly be sold for an astronomical $1.65bn as YouTube was, but maybe on a smaller scale like Flickr, which Yahoo! snapped up for a bargain basement price of $35m.Twitter is being seen as a more instantaneous way to blog allowing users to post short messages, which can be read online or on mobiles.It is the mobile or PDA, however, where the power for growth is really being seen.
The number of messages on its site according to a report in the FT today has jumped from 20,000 to 70,000 a day.
One blogger writing at BlogCritic says:" While I spend a lot of time looking at social networks such as MySpace, I never find a great and compelling reason to stick around. I particularly like MyBlogLog because it's a great networking tool for bloggers (and an experience that lives outside the site through the use of its great blog log widget), but it's simply not fun in the way that Twitter can be."
There must be a buzz as Robin Grant has blogged on this today as well.
The downside is that after the initial buzz (like blogging itself) people tire of getting tidbit updates.
In a BusinessWeek article it highlighted a recent blog post, RIP Twitter (2007-2007), Mathieu Balez, a web entrepreneur, knocked the mundane nature of Twitter posts ("Going to the gym," "Groceries with mother-in-law") and the voyeurism of readers. Twitter will be history by the yearend, abandoned by former fans too tired to keep up with endless streams of quotidian tidbits, he predicted. Balez's blog was soon flooded with comments, pro and con. "Yeah sure," one Twitter supporter replied. "Twitter will die. Just as text messages, mobile phones, blogs, the Internet..."
But then there is the 'Seinfeld' scenario. Like the post-modern episode where Jerry and George pitch NBC "a show about nothing"? At one point George asks a network executive, "What did you do today?""I got up and came to work," the exec replies."There's a show!" George exclaims. "That's a show."That's also a Twitter.During one recent minute Thursday morning, users posted the following urgent updates: "Tried Scottish oatmeal this morning, very impressed. Will have to soon phase out the Quaker oats."; "reading a blog, returning emails".
You just know its going to be a hit.
Gordon Macmillan
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