After pontificating on the newly available Twitter AIR clients available last week and how they were impacting my usage of of said microblogging service (versus Facebook’s status updates), I figured I’d write a bit of an addendum now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to use it on a more regular basis.

Twitter has been blogged about, covered by the media, and discussed to death countless times, I’m sure, but I’m thinking about it from a slightly different perspective. I’m trying to analyze how why it’s so successful and where that success lies in terms of application development; i.e. what can I learn from Twitter’s (and other microblogging platforms’) success, and what can I apply to my own products.

Something that struck my in the shower yesterday morning was how much Twitter reminded me of a certain period of my life. Back in the early-to-mid ’90s, I — along with many other socially-challenged folk I knew at the time — spent a lot of time sitting around, chatting online, sometimes mindlessly, sometimes with a bone to pick, but generally just because we had nothing else to do. Where did I spend much of this time? In the underground (uhm, yeah, well, that might be slightly overrated now) art scene on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, for those of you not familiar with it.)

IRC still exists; a last, proud bastion of the golden days of BBSes, MUDs, and the mostly pre-web (but not quite prehistoric) era of the Internet. I quit it cold turkey back when I was seventeen, in 1995, mainly because I was wasting an inordinate amount of time on it instead of doing schoolwork. Eventually, the combined foundations I built in both graphic design and software development, from discussions with other like-minded kids and twenty-somethings, helped me work my way into the web industry. I give it the props it deserves as it pretty much set the tone and pace of my career henceforth.

Since I’ve started using Twitter more frequently, I’ve started to see the resemblance to IRC. Semi-private conversations held in a public fashion; an obscene amount of egocentric grandstanding by larger-than-life internet personalities; blatantly opinionated people, many of whom hide behind a thin veneer of pseudo-anonymity; and a whole lot of what most would consider useless trash talk. Then, mix in a good bunch of mundane, bland minutiae from bored people commenting on their day, looking to generate conversation. The parallels are there in spades; I’d even wager that many of the people who frequent Twitter regularly today are the same people who moderated and monopolized IRC in the ’90s (or hell, probably even now — I wouldn’t know anymore.)

Of course, this last week and a half being dedicated to MIX 08 and SXSW, there’s a huge amount of worthless conference chit-chat that wouldn’t interest anyone who wasn’t actually attending those conferences — aside from discovering the fact that SXSW appears to be mainly about heckling bad interviewers and a whole lot of BBQ action.

Behind that hazy façade, though, you find some interesting, thought-provoking and insightful discussion. You just need to be paying close enough attention, and following the right people. I’ve made a concerted effort to follow most of the big names in technology, blogging, web development, and graphic design that I respect; at least, those who actually use Twitter. Some are worth it, some aren’t, and some post inane spam at epic rates.

But within that morass, I’ve managed to discover a local scene of people who work in or around my field, and discuss things that I’m actually interested in hearing about. Getting past the unsurprisingly high noise-to-signal ratio may be difficult, but discovering that local scene is interesting in that it lets me hook into a sub-current of conversation that I might not be privy to without following Twitter regularly. In addition, it let me discover a less obvious network of people in my field (or related to it in some way) in Vancouver, of which I would likely never have been aware of otherwise.

As a developer and as an entrepreneur, I look at Twitter as a bit of a Holy Grail; my products (thus far) are much more niche, but generating the same level of user engagement as does Twitter with a minimalist and almost developer intervention-free application is exactly what I’d like to accomplish with Protagonize and/or my future projects. They’ve managed to create a huge community of people who fundamentally depend on the service for a variety of reasons. Not only that, like Facebook, the system’s users spread knowledge of it virally, and it ends up becoming a necessity and no longer an option or choice, if you want to keep in touch with a specific segment of people. On top of that, from a site marketing perspective, Twitter is an invaluable tool: having people follow your product and subscribe to your updates gives you additional means to market your site or service at absolutely no cost, and lets users disseminate information about your product without requiring a guiding hand.

As Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, twittered earlier today — could Twitter have reached the tipping point in which their previously unique service has become completely mainstream? 

I’m still figuring the whole thing out — I realize that I’m late to the game; as I’m usually an early tech adopter, this is new to me. However, I also try to be quite discerning when adopting new technologies, as I’m one of those people who tends to stick with an application or service they believe in, through thick and thin.

I’d be curious to hear of others’ observations on the subject. Feel free to post your thoughts, or drop me a line on Twitter.

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Posted in General, Opinion, Technology, Web 2.0 |