This is a growth trend that most CEOs would give their eye teeth for:
That’s one year’s growth! Of almost a 1000% percent. Sure, it may be “a poor man’s email“1. But these days, who cares if you’re poor as long as you’re enjoying life. Being rich is so passe (This is just between you, me, and the lampost, I would give my eye teeth for a market capitalization of $91 Billion).
One of the more difficult things to grapple with is what twitter is. Or perhaps more importantly, what it isn’t. David Pogue used one of the most valuable spaces in tech industry coverage talking about what twitter isn’t, and a little bit talking about what it is. Anytime that people spend talking about what you’re not, you know you’re in a good place. That means that people care enough to try and figure out just what exactly you’re up to. And having people care about you is the heart and soul of any good internet business. People talk a lot about creating the passionate user. Well, what happens when you have millions of passionate users? Can you change the world?
Let me humbly offer my opinion on what twitter is; it’s a place where you can type 140 characters and send it out to the world. The genius is that it’s only 140 characters. Whoever thought that strong limits could be so enabling? OK, so I know we had shout boxes before this. And I also know that they were particularly spammy. Twitter solves this problem by being opt-in. And it lets SMS solve a problem that email created; free communication. The law of unintended consequences is very much in effect with email, never has something so free been so costly. What do I mean by costly? First off, we passed on the material cost to the providers who have to deal with spam, back-up, and everything else. Perhaps more important is the time cost, I hear more people complain about how much time they spend on inbox management. This may be changing.
We took a straw poll at my Tuesday Night Dinner club about how much people use their email. And the results, while by no means scientific, are still significant. Some people are avid emailers, and they rarely SMS. Others, SMS like the Dickens, and rarely check their email. And a lone straggler, rarely emails and never uses SMS (she’s the last person in the world without a cell phone, bless her heart). As a follow-up we talked about who uses “The Tweeter” (sic). I was the only one to raise my hand. This is fundamentally good news for the service; in the emerging world of twitter, the network effect has yet to really kick in. Keep in mind, that for millions, quite possibly billions, of people their cell phone is their only computer.
If you think the twitter cottage industry is huge, it’s going to get much bigger. All for the love of 140 characters.
In the world of twitter, nobody has really stepped up as a competitor. And perhaps the secret to twitter’s success is that it is neither publishing (blogging) nor communication (email). It’s pubmunication! (Please don’t ever use that phrase seriously.) A fact that someone as tapped in as Eric Schmidt seems not to get.
So really, what’s twitter for? The answer is your words. Do with them whatever you like. But if you think that it’s all sillyness, then you’re missing the point. It has the power to gain people their freedom. And if you want to know what people are thinking about a particular topic, there’s perhaps no better place to take a quick snapshot. Just search for something (say, “Obama“), and then sit there for ten seconds. Did you see the updates? It’s the world in real time. On the internet. Not some cobwebbed index that’s hours old.
1 Even if he was speaking as a computer scientist, twitter poses some of the most interesting questions out there. It’s practically parlor talk to speculate on how you would “scale twitter“.
