Sarah Morgan
Prognosticating the future of Twitter is something of a cottage industry. Particularly among Twitterers.
Why? I guess it’s just the way it’s always been – people like to predict what will happen to the latest medium of communication, and what will come next. The trouble is, it’s really hard to guess and mostly the guesses are wrong. But, because I’m as much of a sucker as the next person, I’m going to lay out what I think, too. I think that Twitter will meld into something. It’s a bit clunky, as it is. There’s plenty of functionality that it could support that it can’t. It’s thankfully moved beyond the fail-whale days (knock wood), but it’s not totally fluid yet.
Also, the name itself is making me slowly insane, because if I hear one more “tw” pun (like my atrocious headline above) I may scream. “Tw”-ing is becoming as bad as “e-“ing was in the early 2000s.
But Twitter is fundamentally changing asynchronous communication. It caught on to a burgeoning thing and made it enormous. It’s enabled a pretty deep social shift – the increasing comfort of people to share tiny yet very personal snippets of life.
Both of those facets are new. Not unheard of – tweaks to existing things we were already familiar with – but combined, it’s a whole new animal.
Think about it: the sound bite is getting ever smaller – now we literally limit it letter by letter. And the degree of intimacy it contains is getting ever bigger.
Twitter is the amuse-bouche of lifestreaming.
It’s not going away. Because who doesn’t love a little nibble of something fascinating?
Great post. My friends who don’t twitter or blog have been joyously informing me of the demise – those without a FaceBook profile are beside themselves. I say boo hiss to them.
Last night while catching up with my tweeding (sorry – I couldn’t help myself) a tweet popped in about the sad death of Michael Jackson – I immediately set up a Tweetdeck search and starting reading what people were saying (and they were saying a lot – every minute or so 100 tweets were pouring in). As I listened to the banal chatter on the BBC 24 News – about ‘is he’ or ‘isn’t he’ (which I immediately turned over to on seeing the tweet) – I suddenly realised how much more informed the twittering was. People were posting links, checking sources, out pouring emotions – it was fascinating and far more informed than the news flash.