I'm going to go on some more about what I think is good about twitter, beyond my prediction that Ev will get double-bought by Google, therein being re-employed for a couple more years at Google, after which -- and I'm speaking from personal experience here -- it would be a wise idea for everyone to unass the platform because Google will digest it and it won't taste good anymore.
<cough>
But I digress.
What's not great about twitter is obvious -- no pun intended -- and welcome. It's the usual "huh's?" of nearly-live product enhancement. Like a few of us not being able to figure out how to do stuff that should be doable--but hey that's what 'direct messages' are for. Like can it scale and still be meaningful to me? How? Like what about spam? Like the culture of following and friending is not as intuitive as it might be. Like the ego-parade nature of twitter transmissions, more chicklet than conversation--how do I engage my friends?
But leave it to the guy who gave us a place to go last time we were bored online to come up with a new place to go when we're bored online, a place where our bored friends can go too. A place that doesn't demand the commitment of a post or a link--twitter: the one-night-stand of online conversation.
Can twitter be the bridge between social spaces? Maybe.
There's not only room for twitter, there's a need--especially in the current low-attention-span culture of the net, where blogging has become part of the 'job' for may of us and we're looking for new escapes that we can do on the sly (i.e., not second life). Twitter's where we can go to fuck off. The enterprise isn't there yet. The first white paper on "Corporations and Twitter: Maxi Results from Mini-Buzz" has yet to be written.
Thank you, queue the chorus.
Funny thing though--the insta-brainpower sitting idle (at least from the corporation's perspective) on twitter is oh so seductive. Change the question from "what are you doing right now" to "what should we be doing for you right now," and you've got insta-opinion (though count on some of it to be brazen and funny and deservedly mocking of the organization).
I'm not saying that businesses should crash the twitter talk.
I'm saying businesses will start asking HOW they can crash the twitter talk. And so we should tell them so they don't come screw it up. A few ideas:
See what Smith Mag did on twitter with the six-word memoir contest. A case study in good taste. Unobtrusively offer opportunities for twitterers to be creative, and reward them for that creativity. Nice.
Get a funny bone.
Make it possible for us to create more, do more, be more. Don't be afraid to create other zones and activities for twitterers to do (online and in real space). There's the open API, after all. ;-)
You could leave us alone and ask to thank you for doing so.
Ah, it's all new, so we'll figure out more as we go.
Right now I'm trying to figure out how to write my book on twitter.
Don't steal my idea.
Tags: twitter, Smith Mag, internet, web2.0, tech, business, advertising, marketing, PR, blogging, twittering - Powered by Qumana
