My Thoughts on the Future of Twitter

You can’t do anything online these days without hearing about Twitter.  I’ve written a few posts about it in the past (found here) and I have to admit that I am impressed with how it has been “blowing up” the past couple of months.  I have had discussions with friends and co-workers about the staying power of Twitter and wanted to share my thoughts with everyone else.

Twitter is a force; an unstoppable force I feel right now.  The only thing standing in its way is itself.  With its huge growth, it has hard times with big events that come with a lot of tweets at the same time.  For example, at the Macworld conference, Twitter experienced a few “Fail Whales” for a couple of hours.  The same with CES that same week.  Other times, it goes down without much of a reason.  But other than that, I really don’t see anything or anyone getting in their way.

I wrote a post comparing Twitter, Plurk and Pownce a few months back and since then Pownce has bowed out of the battle.  Plurk is still just a blip on the radar.  I have an account but don’t really ever use it.  It seemed like a good idea but I never could catch on.  Too many of my friends were on Twitter already and like most people I thought, “Do I need this twice?”

Twitter is not going away any time soon.  I have heard others say that they don’t expect to be on it in 2-3 years time but when I hear that, I can’t help but to think “what will you be on?”  To me, Twitter just has that “it” quality and will soon be mainstream.  I mean, even my mom has an account   I can’t think of anything taking its spot.

It’s one of those things I see people realizing how they lived without before it existed.  Kind of like me with my DVR, I don’t know how I ever was without it.  I feel the same about Twitter.  I have met a ton of people and learned a lot of interesting things in the time I have used it.  I think that Twitter has the power to be around for a while and only grow stronger, probably with the assistance of a bigger company buying them out.  I just hope that They stay true to their initial idea and only imporove upon their infrastructure and stop all of the “Fail Whales”.  Twitter can be a big force like a Google if it plays its cards right.  I guess only time will see.

Twitter, Plurk, Pownce… What’s the Difference

So in today’s world of Web 2.0, everyone knows what everyone else is doing because of micro-blogging. If you’re not sure what micro-blogging is, here’s my definition. Micro-blogging is the idea of posting blogs of 140 characters or less. Because of the shortness of the blogs, they are posted at a much more frequent nature. Most people update what they are doing at that time while others use it to update a new blog post or a song that they just listened to.

Because I like to think that I have a pretty good knowledge of what is going on in the Web 2.0 world, I have accounts on a few of these micro-blogging sites. Following the release of Twitter at the 2007 SXSW, I signed up for it. I used it for a while but I didn’t get much out of it. But I’ve written about that before. I’m using it again on a pretty regular basis. I like to post things that I’ve done, heard or have opinions on.

Twitter is the biggest micro-blogging app out there with 2,955,142 users based on numbers from http://twitter.com/digijustin
Pownce – http://pownce.com/digijustin/
Plurk – http://www.plurk.com/user/digijustin

I’m also looking to meet new people and see what others are saying.