I found this article on Digg discussing how Facebook’s popularity has peaked as of around November 2007 and is beginning to slowly taper off. It is slowly being replaced by Twitter. Personally, I have been addicted to Twitter this past week. It’s a completely different experience than Facebook and I find it much more interactive.
The hardest part is explaining exactly what Twitter is to people who have never used it -I tell them to use it and experience it for themselves. Definitely easier for someone to use it themselves than to try to explain it. In the article I found a few points that help in explaining Twitter and it’s all about:
1. Broadcast tool. Send information to your network of “followers”, your latest blog post, a breaking news, a summary of a conference you’re attending, the boring stuff of your daily life, etc. Best of all, you can share clickable URLs.
2. Conversation tool. Using the @ symbol followed by the Twitter alias, you can ask questions, join an existing conversation and contribute to the community.
3. Early warning system. Breaking news seem to pop-up on Twitter much more quickly than in other media. I’ve learned about different breaking news more quickly in the last few weeks using it. Some people have already created specific channels for breaking news, which you can start following. See BreakingNewsOn or the Techmeme firehose.
4. Proxy conferences. Recently, I was able to follow updates from the TED, a very coveted invite-only conference. You could obviously follow it in real time, but through structured data standards called hashtags, you can also see what people have been reporting about TED here.
5. Subscribe to people. Where else can you follow updates and insights from industry luminaries like Pierre Omidyar (eBay’s founder) or Paul Kedrosky (famed Canadian VC)? There are hundreds of interesting people to follow in Twitter.
This article confirms my thoughts on Facebook. I think we’ll see more people make the switch one it’s discovered. My measure of if something is mainstream or not is the following. Last August my mother asked “what’s a Facebook?”. Once my mothers asks about something I know it’s mainstream. I now await “what’s a Twitter?”
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