Tweet

By Kees Winkel on 29 June 2009

And then there was Twitter. Not less than three years ago nobody had ever heard of this typical social medium. Twitter started in 2006 and is currently enjoying unprecedented success. I have no clue how many people use this micro blog to tell their followers where they are, what they do or what they think. But reading the (printed version of a Dutch) newspaper about Twitter’s overload due to the death of Michael Jackson, it must be a huge crowd. Twitter, in its core, is truly crossmedial. You may use your mobile or your Twitter account. You might want to embed Twitter in your Facebook pages. You name it. It is a fine piece of modern communication tooling which allows us to tell the world what you’re up to. Ever since I was confronted with Twitter, I have asked myself why people – including me – actually use Twitter. Personally I’m not the type to tell the world what I am doing all the time. Maybe I’m too old for this but it requires a lot of handling, both handling of my followers and handling of my micro blogs. I have followers who send Tweets every 10 to 15 minutes and quite frankly, I don’t give a damn.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the annual congress of youth marketers at Nemo in Amsterdam. Some interesting stuff was pondered upon us visitors. During one of the breaks, I had a talk with some self-proclaimed youth marketing guru who claimed his vision that Twitter would be the next great thing for kids. At first I thought why not. Kids like to communicate with their friends through digital media and perhaps a new tool would be picked up at a certain point. There could well be a tipping point soon enough. But then I joined a focus group session with spotty fifteen and sixteen year olds who, much to everyone’s surprise had never heard of the enchanted phenomena. Bizarre, I remember myself mumbling but as it seems, it is not that strange at all.
As far as I’m concerned, Twitter adapts are typically a bit older than adolescent communicators. This is no hard science but probably everybody I know who has an opinion on the matter, agrees. Next there is the Dutch phenomenon called Hyves. This social medium has over six million profiles of predicatively youngsters. In one’s Hyve, one may use a micro blog resembling tool called ‘krabbel’ (scrap). So, what’s the point of using Twitter? Perhaps there will be a tipping point sooner or later. I don’t know but I would surely like to know.
That is why the research group offers a graduate to come and do research on the issue; stuff like what the critical success factors are and to whom it is appealing. And will Twitter stay or is it a temporary whim? Or, how is it possible that Twitter came upon us in warp speed.

Apropos warp speed. History bears some great examples of technology that came with warp speed and disappeared overnight. Second Life has led a short life that might remain as a long tail. WAP and MMS are nice examples in the mobile domain. What has ever become of all those goodies? One might contradict that some of these technologies are now to a certain extent embedded (N-Gage is a fine example with its embedment in Nokia’s N series). Still, it is very difficult to predict the future of technologies.

As far as I am concerned, I don’t see myself as an early adopter when it comes down top embracing each new spot of novelty. It is apparent that I am interested in new stuff professionally. But when it comes down to my role as user/consumer, I kindly leave the bigger part of the communication overload on the shop shelves and, occasionally, pick up the nice to haves. As a professional, I still wonder why people tweet. Is there a graduate who can help me out?

Kees Winkel

tagged with: hyves, micro blog, facebook, crossmedia, twitter

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