-
Website
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/ -
Original page
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/guest-post-the-post-geekdominant-twitterverse/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
All Comments
Kind of tragic in a way - because we know that when the 'mainstream' rushes in, the early-adopters and geek set tend to drift away - but inevitable, I guess.
I'm not so much as thrilled at the idea of 'interacting with celebrities just because they are celebrities and I can' but I'm not the norm, either. I followed and continue to follow people like Wil Wheaton & MC Hammer because they are interesting and intelligent and use the space well. Colbert? Unfollowed for lack of use. Shaq? Unfollowed for lack of personal interest. In the end, the beauty of Twitter has always been for me that the quality of a person's interaction determined the conversations... age was irrelevant - people from 15 to 70's on my list... fame was irrelevant - people from all walks of life... where they are, what they look like, how much money they make? not important compared to what they said.
Looks like that will get drowned out by 'how cool are you in pop culture terms?' and that's depressing from my standpoint. But I guess that's the price of success.
Congrats to Twitter on their success.
1)DELL is using it to announce DEALS - as a Social Media Alert System for Deals.
2)JetBlue is using it to announce Flight Delays, Logistic news,Ticket Reminders, Cancellations. They are also using twitter to answer questions .
3)DIGG uses it to announce there new shows and crowdsource questions - like they did for Al-Gore.
We have created a Interactive flash on how 5 different companies are using twitter. And we have digged old tweets and shown them
http://vizedu.com/2008/12/5-companies-using-twi...
We have created
Chris is number 21 with 23,736 followers as of today.
>> But ultimately, I think that the real winner is you.
There is a big IF after this line, about the quality of your posts, but it's true... the CNN and MSNBC and celebrity people might have huge followings, and entertain and inform, but Twitter gives a voice to the nobodies out there, and allow them to become somebodies...
@jasonalba
Chewing on it for a bit, my initial assumption of mainstream getting a hold of Twitter will not really push us gearheads away from Twitter, but will instead push us away from mainstream. It'll make us want to be segregated into our geeky group that we've always been accustomed to since adoption. We can't possibly reach out to other niches of people that don't understand what Google Reader or a Kindle is. Can we?
Your points, Dr., shows us that we can - albeit may be hard initially for us to stretch our boundaries. Aside from mainstream celebs that are using it now, there's a plethora of people and niches that have yet to form within Twitter and as you said, they eventually will. We can easily stay buried in our iphone and blackberry filled hole but what value would we bring to the community if we shun non-geeks. It'll be a transition and a tough one for some but in the end it's going to truly show Twitter's power of connecting PEOPLE, not geeks.
Appreciate the thought-provoking post!
for me, twitter is "post-blog." it's even bloggier than blogs. it's more populist, more current, less time- and resource-intensive ... all the reasons why blogs were such a revolution compared with traditional publishing. before i joined twitter i had largely stopped reading and writing blogs for a number of reasons. now i'm reading and commenting on your blog because i followed a twitter link; it's a very different way of interacting with the blogosphere.
As the rest of the population begins to discover Twitter, it's likely many of us who have been in since the beginning will be more guarded about Following, using alternate user names, or looking for other services, to keep our neighborhood noise down. But it will be an okay trade off to see SoMe expand to the masses and foster more communication.
What Twitter does best, I think, is strip down the walls that we often build online.
Perhaps because of its simplicity and brevity, it's much easier to tweet snippets of what's going on in friends' heads: an interesting comment on some part of life, a link to what's fascinating or to just engage in stimulating or entertaining conversation. That's not easy with the "macro-blogging" or other traditional web platforms.
The ambient intimacy which Twitter provides is what makes it such a pliant agent for an almost infinite array of human connection: from marketing, to entertainment, to personal connection and on and on.
This is why Twitter is a game-changer: it gets us away from the static web to a stream of human connection. As the nongeeks figure this out (they will because they're WAY smarter and more interesting than we early adopters), Twitter will sing its best notes.
Anybody else feel this way? Am I overzealous with Twitter's potential? Is Twitter the game-changer for the web?
Thanks Mark for your perspective. I've always though that the healthcare community, not the techies, had within it the power to show the world what social media is really all about. Makes me proud. :)
Phil
Twitter Deflowered
I use my middle initial in all things writerly because I hate seeing a celebrity name on a product and wondering - even for just a second - if it's really that celebrity's name when it isn't. I thought about using a pen name, but I'm too proud of who I am and where I come from (both my dad and his dad have 'James' in their name).
If Twitter goes in the direction of being a platform for self-promotion (the dominant meme right now) and/or serves as a way to "peek in" on the life of a celebrity or someone in the public eye, then what happens to the average person?
What I've seen is this: they move to Facebook for posting status updates. This is what several of my friends who dipped their toes in the Twitter water decided to do.
I believe a lot of everyday people posting tweets about being bored, stuck in traffic, playing with their kids, or working on a personal project will gravitate more toward Facebook, where they have a more insular and intimate network of people to whom those types of updates are more appropriate.
It makes sense - I've stopped following some of the "top Twitterers" because I didn't know them well enough to get much out of their tweets about being stuck in traffic or having sick kids.
Twitter then becomes a place where you feel more compelled to post engaging content that appeals to a mass audience so you can "build a personal brand" as Dr. Drapeau describes. If the goal on Twitter becomes to build a personal brand though, how much does it become depersonalized? I think Twitter will become people's "branding" channel and Facebook the channel where they actually post "personal" information.
This isn't a bad thing per se, except in that it will limit Twitter's growth and it will be interesting how they respond. That $500 million that Facebook offered to buy them may become more tantalizing if it's still on the table down the road.
Good post/article. However, part of me wonders if next year the twitter top ten will be dominated by celebrities and mainstream media folks, much the way the iTunes podcast top 100 is now. Which means, there will be less opportunity for discovery and self-promotion for the new twitter user.
The podcast analogy may not apply as much to Twitter, but I can't help thinking that the adoption of new media conversation tools by mainstream organizations usually drain the "magic" out of these grass roots communication channels over time. At least for me.
The other concern I have about this mainstream attention to Twitter is pressure or opportunity (depends how you look at it) for advertising and new features.
Twitter works for me because it's ad free and simple to use. I would hate to see this change.
With the retweeting and random followings leading to miscellaneous connections, I don't always remember how I originally connected to the avatar I may be exchanging 140 character quips with.
I like the way this somewhat evens things out - prominent businessmen/women, editors of top periodicals/blogs, artists, musicians, freelancers, biological scientist-government consultant-writers, stay at home parents and the unemployed all finding ways to related to each other . . . six degrees of separation in action!
Whether it's for concert updates, random thoughts, or politics, I think celebrities are a "brand" that will be a growing force on Twitter in '09. Let's hope the majority of them use the tool as a personal--not corporate--brand (ahem, Ms. Spears...or Sen. Clinton).
About celebrities being on microblogs... I think they'll catch on, too. I'd love to see Marky Mark on Twitter as well. And someone should start a Christopher Walken and Chuck Norris quote machine on Twitter (if it's not already been done! Must investigate.) I never liked Shaq before he came on Twitter... now with his personality shining through, I think he's AWESOME. Twitter definitely broke down the walls between him and fans by the direct communication to us. Very cool.
http://www.youtube.com/coleporter78 buy cheap valtrex online