Recently it's been questioned on RWW that Twitter is still for Geeky people and not for rest of the world. It's hard for someone new to convince why he would share what he is doing with the rest of the world.<p>What about you? Do you believe in Twitter philosophy? Is it only for geeks? Or can it be taken to mainstream people?<p>If yes, what ideas do you think that can be build around that philosophy to provide value proposition rather than just "status updating"?<p>Do you think we need to derive signal from Twitter?
New technologies and ideas like Twitter have a habit of appearing completely useless at first, and then suddenly catching on. I remember the first time I saw the ICQ "pager" on the internet in the mid 90's. My thought was "WTF is this stupid thing good for?", now (like most people) I have multiple IM accounts and do a good bit of my daily communications via IM.<p>I was having a conversation this weekend with my wife about Twitter. She is way more technical than the "average" wife, but doesn't really "socialize" online much (her IM client has only me as a contact). Anyway, I was trying to explain Twitter to her, and some of my summary points were:<p>1) Twitter is the evolution beyond IM, which was the evolution beyond email.
2) Twitter is (likely) best suited for 1-way status updates (I'm at X, doing Y) to close groups of friends vs. "micro-blogging" which seems (to me) like "micro-attention-whoring" most of the time.
3) Twitter is useful when you don't need or want a response, just a way to keep friends/family in the loop about things where the value decays over time (ie: you wouldn't post your vacation summary via Twitter, but you might mention that you landed safely at the airport)
4) Twitter took a new approach, trying to embrace some of the Web2.0 methods, where it's NOT a closed client-server system as IM is. Instead it seems more like a framework that is waiting for the true killer app to be built around it (or, some might say a solution looking for a problem).
Twitter has an interesting problem: they sell it as service to tell people "what are you doing", explicitly pushing the "hyper-connected" angle. This was great for early adopters, but normal people don't care about <i>the idea</i> of being "hyper-connected" and being informed every time their friends fart.<p>Funnily enough though, normal people will care about what Twitter really is: a general-purpose platform-agnostic publish-and-subscribe messaging system. Or as mainstream users will initially see it: a simple way to text & IM all your friends in one go.<p>If Twitter wants to grow big in the mainstream, I think they would do well to completely change their public sales pitch to focus on this. Once this is sucessfully communicated to the average user it will become huge, and people will quickly and instinctively grasp the usefulness of platform agnostic pub/sub.
I'm part of the crowd that still doesn't understand the efficiency of twitter in any environment other than average use. If you want to equate twitter's parallel with geek society because it's hard for geeks to get their non geek friends to use it, by all means make that the bottom line of your argument.<p>For me, I don't think it's an issue of who's a geek and who's not, it's more "who's going to leave their AIM or ICQ protocols to use something on the web that does the exact same thing?".
If my mother wants to know what I am doing, she will call me.<p>People who do not spend most of their time in front of a computer will call their friends directly, rather than checking Twitter.<p>Only the stereotypical geek sees an advantage in non-personal communication about personal matters.
I remember thinking that SMS seemed kind of dumb. If I have a cell phone, and the person I'm messaging has a cell phone, why wouldn't I just make a phone call? Now I probably SMS more than I call...
I think microblogging as a concept has some merit. Everyone forms thoughts differently and for some, Twitter just works.<p>I think when social aggregations catch on more people will be more free to choose whatever medium of expression they choose and be assured that they are communicating with the people they want to communicate with.In fact, I really see a need for the "Sharers" if you will to be able to create their own <i>outbound</i> social feeds that aggregate the many forms of self-expression a single person may want to partake in.
Really? I think it's more like a mini-MySpace: tell the world what you're up to (in excruciating detail). If so I'd expect it to catch on with the same demographic.