by now we’ve all heard the fascinating story of how Twitter was born, five short years ago. No matter what the three founders, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, thought of the messaging platform’s potential, at the time, I’ll bet they couldn’t have guessed that it would one day help put presidents in power and play a role in toppling dictators. Going by Dorsey’s description that Twitter was about “a short inconsequential burst of information, chirps from birds,” they really couldn’t have known.
Despite no end of tweets about the most mundane and apparently meaningless, even silly, things, Twitter turned out to be anything but inconsequential. Some have even referred to it as “the world’s stream of consciousness.”
In part, the success of Twitter comes from the whole shift the Web has been going through for the past few years. If you could define this change in one non-technical word, it would be Democratization.
Remember when the Web went mainstream? Institutions, companies and other big guys realized in slow shock that the little guys, or any guys for that matter, could also build a presence on the internet. And sometimes that presence gave the big fish a good run for their money. Well, much the same thing has been happening now, with anyone who cares to acquiring a voice. That voice could be on a blog, in comments, on social networks.
So that’s where Twitter fitted right in and pushed forward the web’s transformational agenda.
Today Twitter is growing at breakneck speed and there are numbers to prove it. Even though Facebook outnumbers it, Twitter is uniquely positioned in the socialsphere and has both been changed by the world, and changed the world.
From early on, Twitter has very much been a dynamic network in the process of creation by people – developers, who made it easy to use in ways the Twitter team hadn’t thought of, and “Tweeple” who made it useful by using it the way they do. It was users who invented the Retweet which finally saw a dedicated button on the network. It was people who used the hashtag # as an ingenious way to mark and peg tweets around a topic, making it searchable and usable. So, if you were to think of how smartphones are made, it’s really the manufacturers who put in everything to make the device feature-rich and usable. The user just has to grab it and use it as much or as little as desired. But if you take something like Twitter, you’ll see that it isn’t about being handed over a bunch of features. It’s about coming up with a great idea, made immeasurably better by those who use it.
As for third party developers; they created a whole industry of sites, tools and apps to add features to Twitter, among them the popular Tweetdeck, Twitterific, Hootsuite, Twitpic and so many more. Third party developers also developed clever and easy ways of giving a user analytics. Never before was it so easy to see who reads what you write or clicks on what you recommend, how influential you are in your online community or how far your reach goes in the Twitterverse. This measurability added to the many reasons Twitter is the darling of digital marketers.
It’s so ironic that today the same developers are truly cheesed off with Twitter for trying to take control and run the network its own way. While it’s understandable that the company would need to do this to grow the network to make good business sense, it isn’t understandable that the developers should be fobbed off with a ‘So long, and thanks for all the fish’.
There are many events that could be called a part of Twitter’s timeline for the past five years. For me, some of the most important are when it went from “What are you doing” to “What’s happening?” It symbolizes in no uncertain terms how journalists and big news organizations no longer solely and wholly owned news. Today many of us go straight to Twitter when there’s something big happening in the world and most times you can see the lag between the first few tweets and your favorite news anchor breaking it after it’s been broken. It’s amazing that today you’ll probably find the news guys getting their news on Twitter. Sweet justice, I say.
Luckily, journalists found a way to use Twitter to their advantage instead of going under and today you’ll find well known news personalities right within your reach, a tweet away. If you have something sensible to say, that is.
Other turning points were when Twitter began to become part of other networks, sites, and now “real life” media. It was never in doubt that people would use it to brand and market stuff – and many companies like Dell, have proved they can and do make money thanks to Twitter.
Another turning point has been the socialization of mobile phones and tablets and how ths has made the 140-character status updates on-the-spot meaningful. Twitter has really redefined real-time when it partnered with the smartphone. Just ask Google, who had to add a whole layer of real-time search to its engine.
And much as happens in real life, there’s been not-so-good stuff on Twitter too. Strange people shoot to fame, inexplicable trending topics make you wonder how much time humankind wants to waste on silliness, and people get hired and fired, shoot to fame and fall flat in shame, get burgled, get saved, get spammed and get rich.
The ultimate proof of the pudding for those who still believe Twitter and other social networks are just about what you ate for breakfast, is the way they have helped people get together to bring about a whole spate of revolutions across a big chunk of the world. Now, that’s a good thing or a bad thing depending on whether you’re a dictator or not, but one thing’s for sure: no one can fail to take this five-year-old seriously again.
#HappyBirthday, Twitter
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Yamunesh
