The Twitter Effect
Over the last few years a small company called "Twitter" has become one of "those" companies.
A company, that everyone wants a piece of along with Facebook, foursquare, and linkedin. They
are company who is at the forefront of the social website revolution. Like their contemporaries
Twitter caught everyone off guard because no one could figure out what possible use the product
could be. No one saw the potential not even the creators. People were quick to dismiss it as just
another site for a bunch of narcissistic people who wanted everybody to pay attention to them.
This may have once been true for the early adopters, but no longer.
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you to communicate using
short texts (140 characters or less) called "tweets" either just your friends or to a large group of
followers (NewsBlaze LLC, 2010). Seems simple enough right? Well it is and that is just one of
the beautiful things about it. What most people and businesses missed was that it is a new way to
communicate and it happens instantly. That right there, the "instantly" part is an important part
of the success that the company has been having. Another part of the success in my opinion is
the limitation of the amount of characters you can type. Why? Because it forces people to be
brief and concise in what they have to say.
The power of the "tweet" really became apparent during various crises that happened over the
last 24 months. People, just regular people, were able to become reporters and keep a running
update of whatever was going on at the time. They were able to break stories in an instant long
before the "professional" media could. This was all done in real time as it happened. A number
of countries that are used to doing whatever they wanted to their countrymen could no longer
keep the rest of the world in the dark. People in these countries would immediately start tweeting
what was happening about the infringement of their human rights. These tweets would go out all
over the world with almost no way to stop them. This is something that makes Twitter an
important company and service.
Twitter has also brought interactive TV closer to reality. For instance during the 2010 MTV
music awards a twitter feed ran showing you the viewer what the stars were saying backstage.
The stars themselves were tweeting the comings and goings of everyone and you could
immediately respond back to the celebrities themselves (McGirt, 2010). These and many other
reasons are why twitter is a great service. They are also an example of a company that people
missed the big picture on and now are struggling to catch up.
