I’ve been using Twitter personally since October 2006 (which makes me one of the earliest users of the service). And it’s now flavour of the month - Number 10 Downing Street loves it, and it’s been on the front page of newspapers.
The thing that has struck me is how social it’s become - I used to pop along to a London Blogger’s Meetup earlier in the week after seeing buzz about it on Twitter, and every time a live media event happens - for example, an episode of the Apprentice, or a Champions League semi-final, I find myself conversing in real-time with people I may or may not have ever met in person about it.
But Twitter wasn’t social to begin with. It was about “What are you doing?” and was more individual than social. A bit of fun, a bit of egoplay. Then people started adopting it for their own uses, they started talking to each other, using @ to prefix public messages across to each other (something roughly equivalent to a Facebook wall post). Twitter saw people using it in this way and added features, making @username link through to that person’s profile, flagging these as “in reply to”, and creating a Replies tab on people’s homepage, listing the replies just to them. Having just spent a few minutes looking over the public timeline and some counting on my fingers, I reckon between 40 and 50% of Twitter posts are this kind of social interaction.
There’s two important things to take from this:
- All web apps these days tend towards the social. If you haven’t got a way of making them social, your users will find a way.
- If your users have found a new way of making it social, then you should be smart enough to tweak and change it to fit their needs.
That’s one of the key reasons why Twitter has got where it is - not just being very good at what it does, but willing to keep track how its used intently and changing accordingly.
The above thoughts were sparked by a comment I left at Wadds’ Tech PR blog on Twitter, a post itself well worth reading.
