I know it’s pompous to say it, but I’ll say it anyway: I was on Twitter before it was “cool.” I say that based on the assumption that Twitter “gained critical mass” or “became self-aware” at the time of, coincidentally, SWSX and the TWiT Network’s promotion of the service. That is when I noticed that the usage spiked. Contributing to the flame was Iconfactory’s release of Twitterrific. I was on Twitter just slightly before that.
I don’t say this to puff myself up, I’m just saying it because of the perspective I have from being with Twitter earlier on than most. I don’t think I fully understand everything that’s going on with this service and I doubt that anyone really could. I hope I’ve got this right, but who knows. Back in those days…hold on let me get comfortable in my rocker and readjust my afghan to better warm my weary old legs…yes, in them days, Twitter wasn’t the way it is today. It’s changed.
More accurately, I think, it’s changing; constantly changing.
Originally, Twitter was used as kind of “iChat status without the iChat.” You saw the question, “What are you doing?” and you answered it. That’s it. You got people saying “Making dinner” or “Blogging” or “Looking at something that says ‘What are you doing?’”
Once more people got on board, people quickly got more creative and expressive. And once people get expressive, they impact others. And when people are impacted, they want to impact back. You could send Direct Messages to others on Twitter through the website, but for some reason the community devised a protocol of adding @ to the beginning of a person’s username to address them more publicly and interact with them. This protocol has been adopted by Twitter itself as a reply. It is also supported by Twitter clients.
This community driven evolution (I think that’s how it happened) change Twitter from just a status report or “micro-blogging” platform, to a really clumsy IRC-like chat service. (Honestly, for chat, it’s crappy. If anyone had sold this as chat from the outset 1) people would have said “why do I need another chat platform?” and 2) they would have laughed at how this one works) This change has also split the Twitterverse into at least two factions.
The first faction—the traditionalists, the micro-bloggers—they probably don’t “tweet” that often and what they do tend to post is pretty concise, clever, thoughtful, composed and intended to be interesting to all. They also seem to only check the posts of the people they are following a few times throughout a day and get used to claiming “Twitter bankruptcy” upon each visit after reading a few of the most recent posts.
The second faction—the communities, the chatters—they post constantly. The tell you when they stand up, sit down, take a drink, inhale, exhale. They link, they reply and they reply to your replies. They often follow everyone who follows them and their most interesting tweets are questions thrown out to the Twitter community at large to gnaw on and discuss.
For the most part the two factions get along. The only problems I have witnessed are when someone from the first faction follows someone from the second. The first faction twitterer may grow weary of seeing the entire Twitter client screen filled with posts from a single second faction member. At this point, the first faction member usually stops following the second factioner.
You would think this would lead to the demise of the second faction. That the drop in numbers of followers would eventually defeat them under their own words leaving them with so much to say and no one to listen, but it doesn’t. The site Tweeterboard tracks Twitter users and ranks them based on frequency of posts, links sent, and numbers of replies sent and received and does so by checking activity throughout the day. It is all about the second faction. Compare its Top 100 to that of Twitterholic. Twitterholic lists its Top 100 based solely on who has the most followers, most friends or most updates. You will notice that several names are shared by each list.
So I deduce that Twitter is indeed changing, it’s changing by the will of the community and, probably because of that, it is just as popular as ever.
Twitter is an amorphous community and it’s hard to categorize it. I’m sure I have over simplified things here, but take from it what you will.
