I have been a regular user of Facebook for some years now, but my attention has been drawn to Twitter – that service, almost certain to rival the world’s earlier innovations in the industry. My article, Why Twitter haters are wrong, published on my blog registered more than 100hits in one week. And considering the amount of publicity twitter has got over the last 6months, I believe it is the hotter topic at the moment.
The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You’ve probably heard about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and thought, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast katogo or muhogo."
Well, this micro blogging service has amassed 21million visitors in under four years! It became so critical to the dissemination of news during the elections in Iran that the US government asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled upgrade. For those who have just joined us, I’m talking about TWITTER.COM, founded by two youths, Biz Stone, 35 and Evan Williams about 4years ago. Williams 37, had earlier founded BLOGGER.COM which he sold to Google in 2003.
Definitely, Ugandans are more familiar with Facebook, so it’s critically difficult to write about Twitter without mentioning Facebook. I’ve been writing about Twitter on my blog but the number of hits on that thread reveals how little interest Ugandans have in the subject. But no doubt, this is a real winner.
The Super-Fresh Web
The basic mechanics of Twitter are remarkably simple. Users publish tweets — those 140-character messages — from a computer or mobile device. (The character limit allows tweets to be created and circulated via the SMS platform used by most mobile phones.) As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education. Some celebrity Twitterers — most famously Ashton Kutcher — have crossed the million-follower mark, effectively giving them a broadcast-size audience. The average Twitter profile seems to be somewhere in the dozens: a collage of friends, colleagues and a handful of celebrities. The mix creates a media experience quite unlike anything that has come before it, strangely intimate and at the same time celebrity-obsessed. You glance at your Twitter feed over that first cup of coffee, and in a few seconds you find out that your nephew got into med school and Shaquille O'Neal just finished a cardio workout in Phoenix.
Recently, Twitter added a search box that gives you a real-time view onto the chatter of just about any topic imaginable. You can see conversations people are having about a presidential debate or the American Idol finale or Tiger Woods.
Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching. At its heart, Google's system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google's search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That's a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it's not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the "super fresh" Web. Even in its toddlerhood, Twitter is a more efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google. If you're looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Cristiano Ronaldo, you search Google. If you're looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the free kick Ronaldo just scored 30 minutes ago, you go to Twitter.
Twitter.com have changed very little in the past two years. But there's an entire Home Depot of Twitter tools available everywhere else.
As the tools have multiplied, we're discovering extraordinary new things to do with them. Two months ago, an anticommunist uprising in Moldova was organized via Twitter. Twitter has become so widely used among political activists in China that the government recently blocked access to it, in an attempt to censor discussion of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. A service called SickCity scans the Twitter feeds from multiple urban areas, tracking references to flu and fever. Celebrity Twitterers like Kutcher have directed their vast followings toward charitable causes (in Kutcher's case, the Malaria No More organization).
Social networks are notoriously vulnerable to the fickle tastes of teens and 20-somethings (remember Friendster?), so it's entirely possible that three or four years from now, we'll have moved on to some Twitter successor. But the key elements of the Twitter platform — the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching — will persevere regardless of Twitter's fortunes, just as Web conventions like links, posts and feeds have endured over the past decade. In fact, every major channel of information will be Twitterfied in one way or another in the coming years:
News and opinion
Increasingly, the stories that come across our radar — news about a plane crash, a feisty Op-Ed, a gossip item — will arrive via the passed links of the people we follow. Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network. This will lead to more news diversity and polarization at the same time: your networked front page will be more eclectic than any traditional-newspaper front page, but political partisans looking to enhance their own private echo chamber will be able to tune out opposing viewpoints more easily.
Searching
As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the value of searching for information via your extended social network will start to rival Google's approach to the search. If you're looking for information on Benjamin Franklin, an essay shared by one of your favorite historians might well be more valuable than the top result on Google; if you're looking for advice on sibling rivalry, an article recommended by a friend of a friend might well be the best place to start.
Advertising
Today the language of advertising is dominated by the notion of impressions: how many times an advertiser can get its brand in front of a potential customer's eyeballs, whether on a billboard, a Web page or a NASCAR hood. But impressions are fleeting things, especially compared with the enduring relationships of followers. Successful businesses will have millions of Twitter followers (and will pay good money to attract them), and a whole new language of tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers engaged: early access to new products or deals, live customer service, customer involvement in brainstorming for new products.
Not all these developments will be entirely positive. Most of us have learned firsthand how addictive the micro-events of our personal e-mail inbox can be. But with the ambient awareness of status updates from Twitter and Facebook, an entire new empire of distraction has opened up. It used to be that you compulsively checked your BlackBerry to see if anything new had happened in your personal life or career: e-mail from the boss, a reply from last night's date. Now you're compulsively checking your BlackBerry for news from other people's lives. And because, on Twitter at least, some of those people happen to be celebrities, the Twitter platform is likely to expand that strangely delusional relationship that we have to fame. When Oprah tweets a question about getting ticks off her dog, as she did recently, anyone can send an @ reply to her, and in that exchange, there is the semblance of a normal, everyday conversation between equals. But of course, Oprah has more than a million followers, and that isolated query probably elicited thousands of responses. Who knows what small fraction of her @ replies she has time to read? But from the fan's perspective, it feels refreshingly intimate: "As I was explaining to Oprah last night, when she asked about dog ticks ..."
End-User Innovation
The rapid-fire innovation we're seeing around Twitter is not new, of course. Facebook, whose audience is still several times as large as Twitter's, went from being a way to scope out the most attractive college freshmen to the Social Operating System of the Internet, supporting a vast ecosystem of new applications created by major media companies, individual hackers, game creators, political groups and charities. The Apple iPhone's long-term competitive advantage may well prove to be the more than 15,000 new applications that have been developed for the device, expanding its functionality in countless ingenious ways.
The history of the Web followed a similar pattern. A platform originally designed to help scholars share academic documents, it now lets you watch television shows, play poker with strangers around the world, publish your own newspaper, rediscover your high school girlfriend — and, yes, tell the world what you had for breakfast. Twitter serves as the best poster child for this new model of social creativity in part because these innovations have flowered at such breathtaking speed and in part because the platform is so simple. It's as if Twitter's creators dared us to do something interesting by giving us a platform with such draconian restrictions. And sure enough, we accepted the dare with relish. Just 140 characters? I wonder if I could use that to start a political uprising.
Definitely, that wouldn’t be the best idea in an African setting. When I was in my final year at Makerere, I had an admiration for social networks. We had just been through with the Guild Presidential elections, and campuser.net had been a big hit – am not sure how old it was then. Students were spending quality time in labs sending free SMS messages, and various contestants were buying space on this portal. In my opinion, its design wasn’t that appealing... Some browny 1024pixels wide website, with usually ugly/poorly cropped photos on the “profile of the day” section in the top-right. But the site did the basic minimum: Sending the messages promptly.
That is around the time I started my own ALMUC.COM. I would say I invested less than $100 (Compared to Facebook’s $200,000 in 2004), and I used my own skills, based on the information I could get from Google. ALMUC.COM had free SMS messaging, Live news feeds from Yahoo!, ABC News, and Google, it had a discussion forum, free Message boards (Called Shout boxes, and several other services. While it averaged 50hits a day, it was judged to take a longer gestation period for start making money. In fact, longer than I was willing to wait. The other challenge was the visitors’ low response to blogs and forum threads. I chose not to run it for the second year.
We applaud Evan Williams and Biz Stone for their wonderful innovation, and the patience to see it rule the world. But Africa needs to learn to embrace such innovations in order to encourage them.
