Social Web 3.0

With blogging becoming more and more mainstream everyday, something new had to take it’s place as the newest personal publishing format, right? Micro-blogging1 is that new format, and it's really no more than status updates—Micro-blog post’s are almost always less than 200 characters and usually used as a means to update friends or anyone to what you’re doing.

Twitter is the micro-blog

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?2

Twitter is essentially synonymous with micro-blogging. Of course there are alternatives, but you’d be hard pressed to find one nearly as popular as Twitter. So what is it? Twitter lets you post up to 140 characters, and then follow what people are tweeting3. It’s definitely drawn a crowd—you can even read tweets from Darth Vader. More seriously, even CNN updates with it’s breaking headlines on Twitter. Since the only limit to what you can do with Twitter is the length of what you have to say, it leaves lots of creative potential. Businesses could post product releases, famous people can use it to boost their popularity and exposure.

Our society moves so fast that we don’t give anything much time. In the online community, there’s an acronym, “tl;dr” which stands for “too long; didn’t read.” And while the online community can take this idea of satisfaction now to the extreme, it’s easily seen in business and education as well. Businesses are looking for what can make the most money today; Students stop paying attention the longer their lecture is.4

In this sort of society, 140 characters is set up to rule.

What could kill Twitter?

The first post by someone answering the essential Twitter question, “What are you doing?” is likely to be “trying to figure this thing out.”5

With all new things, a relatively small group of people adopt it and love it; the rest have no idea what it is or why they need it. I’m fairly connected to the group of people that love Twitter, and still had a hard time figuring it out (saying that as if I’ve actually figured it out.) The first question I had is why I really need this. I already update my status from time to time on Facebook, and while it’s interesting to browse people’s status when I’m bored, boredom is really the only motivator for that. The second question was if I knew enough people on Twitter for it to even be useful to me. Unfortunately for this writing, the answer to that question is no. Even if my friends have heard of Twitter, they’re still hung up on the issue of why. Michael Simmons, a web developer out of Chicago said, “I like it, I just don’t use it, because I think of it as a ‘what am I doing’ thing, and I just work.”

On the opposite side, those who have many friends on Twitter can get burnt out on the concept. Just like with blogs and videos on the internet, most of it is just crap that you move through on the way to the good morsels. Compounding that is the fact that the people with lists of friends on Twitter already have full RSS feeds of blogs and other content they read, as well as full email inboxes and an IM account full of friends. Talk about content burnout. Remember, the idea behind things like Twitter is to absorb content in short form; What’s the difference between long form content and a bucket full of short form content?

The future is bleak?

All that said, I think Twitter is shaping the future of content on the web. I remember the days when blogs—then weblogs—were new and there was even more controversy than there is now on their existence, with only a core group of adopters. Today, blogs are everywhere; People get payed to blog.

I think as Twitter grows, people are going to learn how to use it better. Just like how out of so many blogs, a few great blogs rise to the top, I think the same will happen with Twitter. I don’t necessarily think that Twitter is for everybody—neither are blogs—however I think it is perfect for certain people.