It was probably inevitable. The incredible rise of Twitter has already led to predictions of its demise. 
I will admit that I think often about the value and meaning of microblogging. In the last 24 hours there have been some excellent posts by Joe Marchese and social media columnist Catharine Taylor at MediaPost, the former with some sharp ideas on how Twitter can offer unprecedented real-time information (as in the case of earthquakes), and the latter on just murky the value of social media, especialy Twitter, can be.
So is this 140 character thing just a fad? Let’s remember that Twitter has been around for two years. Journalists, experts, analysts and many others have been using the service for some time. The problem, I think, is that so many newbies have found Twitter that they’re not quite sure exactly how to use it and what the point is. And Twitter is about as free form as you can get.
In answering this question for our clients, we do believe Twitter is the real thing. First and foremost, Twitter is literally an open feed into the consciousness of the Net and the country. I’ve caught all kinds of stuff that interested me. And when it comes to humor, Twitter is creating a new art form – more than a one liner, less than a monologue.
Just off the top of my head I can think of a number of ways I use Twitter:
- Breaking news – For breaking news on big events, Twitter is lightening quick.
- Data referral – This means nothing more than getting news, articles and information you wouldn’t have if someone hadn’t touted it on Twitter.
- Instant focus group – Any subject, any trend. Especially valuable for companies.
With more and more people on Twitter, though, I think we’ll need to see an evolution (and soon) in how to go about managing it. The single-column stack contains only a sliver of the folks I follow, for instance. Here, then, is my modest proposal to make Twitter even more valuable:
- More powerful, fine-grained search. Why do searches only go back a couple of days? There needs to be better “advanced search” options that allow us to capture tweets that go back in time and that filter out those that aren’t relevant.
- Platforms like TweetDeck that make it easy to organize and sort the vast amount of tweets out there. Having just started using this, it has renewed my faith in the ability of Twitter to deliver value.
- The ability to better manage and organize those you follow and those who follow you. Have you ever tried to scroll through all of your followers for list hygeine? I can’t imagine what it’s like for those who follow thousands.
I think what we will see is an entirely new etiquette surrounding the Twitter-verse, in which people are much more disciplined in who they follow and what they post. We also will see more TweetDeck kinds of applications that allow us to wring even more value from the service.
If you want more, here’s MIN’s take on best-in-class Twitter practices.
What do you think?
Interesting perspective. What I believe we will see, and will see quickly is Google and other search engines crawling the web in real time — every second as opposed to the frequency in which they currently do. One will have the option to select the duration of time in which their search entails directly under the search bar. For example
Search:
Now , Within One Day, Within One Week, Within One Month, Within One Year and All