Created by 4 wonderful team members, Twitter has surprisingly emerged to one of the world’s most popular micro-blogging platform with about 30 million tweets posted by 4-5 million active users every month without any money-making business model in hand. So what makes it so “hot” and will its traditional “What Are You Doing?” so-called slogan be eliminated in the years to come and transform to a Digg/StumbleUpon-like style?
Why the 140 characters or less tweeting style has attracted millions of users worldwide is because of the excessive media coverage by CNN, BBC and New York Times. Also, a decent number of world-class celebrities such as Barack Obama, Kevin Rose, Stephen Fry, Lance Armstrong and Britney Spears using Twitter has turned avid fans into followers. However it seems that most followers of these celebrities fall under the “Not So Active” group whereby they don’t really post tweets that often and don’t even bother changing the default thumbnail into a personalized one. Twitter’s Japanese version is indeed a success with thousands of tech-savvy Japanese using it since it first started on April 22, 2008.
Even though the core of Twitter is simply allowing Twitterers to either share their social life or tell their friends “What Are You Doing Now?”, however this traditional style is moving towards to a Digg/StumbleUpon platform of posting and sharing interesting links with others. In this case, it’s called Re-Tweeting. From my observation, a huge majority of Twitter users (popular ones includes Robert Scobleizer and Guy Kawasaki) tends to share links more often than posting “pure” tweets such as a short sentence saying “I’m at the London Heathrow Airport now…Heading to Paris for a Business Trip”.
What Twitter Will Be Like Ten Years Later:
Its traditional focus of “What Are You Doing?” will still remains intact as a significant number of celebrities will join the network soon to increase their fan base. From several timelines of celebrities which I’ve observed, it’s quite rare to see them sharing links or retweeting them. However, retweets will continue to be a common sight on the public timeline because the social Web is expanding at an exponential rate. Hence, the conclusion is that Twitter is currently moving from “What Are You Doing?” to a Digg/StumbleUpon sharing style but not completely. It definitely won’t happen!