21 July 2008
Where is Twitter going?
Posted by Charley under: Mobile; Tech and design; Thoughts .
First, what is Twitter? Indeed it’s a micro-blogging platform. Quick updates can be sent to the service via a few different mediums (Text message, IM etc.). Subscribers can then consume the updates using their own medium of chose (RSS, API etc.). For most users the experience lands somewhere between a chat room and a blog. It’s often used to serve two separate purposes, 1) group communication and 2) personal publishing.
Here are some real world ‘group communication‘ examples I’ve contributed:
- Comment (Describing my feelings to a specific person)
- Response (To a friend who had asked about my lunch plans)
And here are some ‘personal publishing‘ Tweets:
- Local theater review (An attempt to provide value-added content for friends)
- Self expression (I’m a huge Nirvana fan and therefore thought Spain’s TRL was actually good)
Remember that these two forms of communication aren’t by any means new to the internet (mIRC, BB’s etc.). By definition, there are shifts in trends and fads. This all makes me wonder as the spammers crawl in, will Twitter be used more for communities or publishing? My gut sense says the latter as it generally serves up higher grade content.