Three reasons why Twitter is serious
May 14th, 2009
Yesterday’s post about Twitter has drawn good-natured pushback from fellow bloggers Wes Trochil (see the comments to the original post) and Kevin Holland. In the interest of advancing this dialogue, let me offer three observations to amplify yesterday’s core message:
1. Debating the seriousness of Twitter is a pointless exercise. It is a popular service with a growing user base. That makes it serious, and questioning the judgment of the many millions of people worldwide who use Twitter everyday simply because we don’t understand the service’s value is counterproductive.
2. Neither the fact that Twitter is free nor its lack of a clear business model bear on the question of seriousness. There are other free web technologies that have failed to achieve half the impact of Twitter in twice the time. (Can you say RSS?) The lack of a business model is relevant to Twitter’s sustainability, but other nascent technology companies also took some time to discover their business models. (Can you say Google?)
3. Twitter is still very much in its experimental phase, so its future trajectory cannot be known with any precision. But Twitter has quickly become a platform for enormous end user creativity, and that is a big part of what will make it serious going forward. Watch the video of the talk given by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams at this year’s TED Conference, and you will learn how Twitter has changed over the first few years of its existence, driven in large measure by the inventive uses of the service imagined and implemented its rapidly-expanding community. Look for more of this co-created innovation in the years ahead.
So rather than debating whether Twitter is serious, or comparing it to pet rocks or disco, I invite association leaders to pursue a different line of inquiry: what can I learn from Twitter? Leaders who do so with an open mind will be pleasantly surprised.
Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pinnovation.
Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, What's New?, Social Media, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover, The Association Innovator, Simplicity, We Have Always Done It That Way, Google, Videos, Garage Memes, Embrace the Revolution
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