Thursday, October 1, 2009
Twitter's Promise, the opportunity within the opportunity
The late 90's ushered in the dawn of the public Internet as we know it today. Back then, at least 14 years ago now, almost all information was free, from games, to music, to movies, to research, to porn and the list goes on. Soon people began to ask, "how do I make money from this thing called the Internet?" and the rest is history.I recently attended a Gartner conference where one of the speakers made (what I thought) quite a controversial statement, i.e. with Cloud Computing the application developers (e.g. Twitter) will not always foresee how application consumers (you and me) will use their applications. Take Twitter, for example, it orginally started out with people tweeting about their every movement. Soon people began to ask and are still asking, "how do I make money from this thing called Twitter?" Now Twitter is being used for above and below the line advertising and the owners of Twitter are seriously considering the advertisement route (like Facebook) now that they have more than 50 million active users, a captive audience, a distribution channel.
Twitter is more than that, i.e. it's also about the person/company behind the product. It's about sharing your passion with the rest of us, that thing that makes you unique, almost like a constantly evolving self-organizing (tagging) memory (think "IP") cell in the greater organism we call the Internet. Its about freely giving away your IP, just like in the good old days of the Internet, pirated or not. This can be a difficult thing to comprehend, i.e. giving away your IP. Back then, when I was an IT consultant, I was told by a very successful colleague of mine that his secret was that he focused on working himself out of a job. This created new opportunities for him all the time. Strange, I know. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and others are providing us with a global platform for personal and collective reinvention.
Twitter's value emanates from the community, the collective, through conversation, but this community is MUCH bigger, it's global. This means that ground-zero information travels in seconds around the world. This is why the big "tradional" news companies are jumping on the social media band wagon, i.e. this is where they get their first hints of a breaking story, the latest news, on the ground, raw and real. Whether it be political views, weather news, real-estate expert opinion, what's happening on the ground in Sumatra, China, Samoa, USA, North Korea, India, SaaS expert opinion, sports results, etc. This is also why the "traditional" celebrity TV presenters such as Oprah, Ellen Degeneres and Martha Stewart use Twitter. They are using us for INSPIRATION. One of them recently asked their followers the following question: "If you were interviewing Serena Williams, what would you want to know about her?" Get it? We are all doing it to each other. We are all muses. Ask yourself this, "given the global doldrums that we find ourselves in, what is the price of INSPIRATION?" Can you put a price to it? This is Twitter's evolved promise, it's bigger than money.
Not sure about you, but since joining Twitter, I've very quickly become well-versed in a few fields such as SaaS, Cloud Computing and Social Media. What kind of conversations have you been following? have you been engaged in on Twitter? Is it possible that your area of focus on Twitter is making you part of a certain kind of a community? Imagine always being closely surrounded by thousands of colleagues sharing and brainstorming (24x7). So, when you want some inspiration you simply dip your toe into Twitter for a couple of hours, then step back (feeling overwhelmed), then reflect and then ... the LIGHTBULB MOMENTS!!!
Off-course, Twitter is many other things as well.
Your thoughts?
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