Oh yes… another post about Twitter… Stop looking so excited!

I have been using Twitter for about a month now and so far I’m liking it but not addicted. I can to see many of the services’ advantages, but these seem to mainly apply to blogger’s and their readers. Being able to embed my tweets into my blog is a great way to post those mundane things that wouldn’t make a full blog post and the service provides a non-intrusive way to stay in contact with associates over the Internet.

Unlike other social media and communication tools there is little obligation to respond to tweets… even when directed at you. In contrast email, instant messenger or even MySpace comment all encourage you to actually respond.

After a year of crazy growth Twitter is now the subject of a series of controversies. It’s lack of business model is a serious issue, although it has had no trouble in gaining venture capital recently. Service outages have also been an issue of late.

What is mainstream?

A topic of some debate, I tend to agree with the view that mainstream is when a service

becomes ingrained in the public consciousness and culture. Some examples are MySpace, Facebook, Google, Ebay, Amazon, Flickr and MSN. These respectively dominate the various web services: Search, Photos, Shopping, Keeping in touch with Friends and and Instant Messaging.

In many cases the company names have also become synonymous with their function; such as
MSN for any messaging service. I could also mention each of these names to almost anyone and they know instantly what I was referring to.

Twitter, although having a pop-culture ready name, is not yet at this point. I can’t think of one person I know outside of the blogging culture who knows what Twitter is, or even cares. Until this point, and you can argue all the emergency services you want, I don’t see Twitter as mainstream.

Why won’t Twitter become Mainstream?

Sometimes the concept of Twitter can be hard to explain to people and even harder for them to understand why it is worth using.

Micro-blogging? Writing 140 character messages to no one in particular?

It certainly cant see it appealing to anyone I know. A couple of weeks ago however I began using Flock as my main browser, and after configuring all my web accounts I realised something.

Everyone is already micro-blogging.

Down my Flock sidebar I was getting all my contact notifications from Twitter and Facebook, and they were sure looking very similar:

“Daniel is talking to Eliza”, “Bronte is tired”, “Sharon has just been reminded of her younger days”

All these contacts are using Facebook status messages in much the same way as Twitter, changing them regularly sometimes even several times a day. Not only that, Facebook feeds allow you to see when and what everyone else changes their status too. Recently MySpace also incorporated a similar system as well.

With these features what reason is there to sign up for yet another service?

I know its not the same as Twitter, but for the majority of people, the mainstream, it provides them with what they need. As many people have expressed lately, people don’t suddenly think “I’ll go join a social network today”, they may not even know what a social network is. They simply have a need, (sharing photos), and look for something to fill that need (Flickr, Photobucket).

Twitter doesn’t fill a need people have. Effectively it is simply an extension of one small part of the functionality provided in Facebook and MySpace. Maybe if users began feeling a need for status messages to be archived and kept in a timeline then Twitter would have a chance, but I just don’t see that happening any time soon.