There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days that Twitter has now become a ubiquitous, mainstream tool. Yes, it is a tool that members use to update their followers (I’m not going to group them as friends) to what they are up to day to day, hour to hour, and minute to minute. I recently saw a sprint commercial (video | story) that mentions that “233,267 people just twittered on Twitter and 26% of you viewing this have no idea what that means”. After this past week, I think the 26% has been lessened considerably.
If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, here you go. Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and CNN (@CNNbrk) recently had a contest (video | story) to see who could reach 1,000,000 followers on twitter first. If Ashton beat CNN to the 1M mark, he would ding-dong-ditch Ted Turner’s house. Ashton won (although I haven’t yet heard about the doorbell prank happening yet). I should note that both participants agreed to donate 10,000 mosquito nets for World Malaria Day. Oprah caught wind of the contest and decided that she is now going to be on twitter (@Oprah). She even crowned Ashton the king of twitter (sigh) during the show aired Friday, April 17.
[smartads]
What do I make of all this? Maybe we won’t see as much of the fail-whale (Twitter’s image shown to members when the site cannot handle the traffic). There is definitely going to be an influx of users after all this. Possibly to hurt this newfound popularity is Twitter’s own lack of a business plan (story). One of the comments that may make this possibility null is Biz Stone’s own comment to PC World that Twitter has enough money in its coffers. If this is true, then please try to improve the reliability of the site. I normally get told that the site is being over-capacity a few times a week. This may change for me as I’ve been using TweetDeck now and really only login to view new followers, get a specific tweet, or read a tweet that I accidentally cleared from my view before actually reading it.
Does the recent events change my outlook on how I am going to view the Twitter service and use it? Only if my ability to access the site changes drastically. I enjoy reading the tweets of people I follow, responding to some, and re-tweeting the fun, informative, or interesting. I’m sure that a larger portion of my friends will add Twitter accounts, and hopefully they let me know. I only started my account in September 2008, so I’m still somewhat of a noob. A few of my co-workers have commented on their 2-year Twitterversary lately. I’m sure something sparkly and new will come out in the next few years that radically changes the way people communicate with each other and find out about what’s going on with the world around them. Until then, I’m going to tweet my way through my day just like I’ve been doing for the past 6 months.
