It's been about a year and a half since I wrote a column for The Independent about twitter.com. At the time, the general response from readers was that it felt like an lowpoint of irrelevant social networking, and that the constant flow of information was both unnecessary and intrusive. And unlike Facebook or MySpace, Twitter seemed as if it was probably destined only to be used by geeks, for the benefit of other geeks. But over the past few months, the service seems to have made a perceptible shift towards the mainstream. Of course, that might just be my own skewed perception from one very small corner of the internet – but its user base is undoubtedly expanding, and the service is feeling more valuable as a result.
For those who don't know what it is, it's a service to which you can post text message-sized updates. So, it's not dissimilar to Facebook status updates, but it's more powerful and unhindered by all the extraneous guff you get when you log into Facebook. One admittedly inaccurate measure of the service's growth is the number of people who start following your timeline; I'm notified by email each time someone clicks the "follow" button on >my page, and the rate at which those emails arrive is slowly increasing – and I'm a pretty passive user who doesn't really mention the fact that I use it (except now, of course.) Admittedly, a percentage of those people are complete strangers who are using automated bots to add thousands of people at once, purely in order to get people to follow them back – i.e. spammers, effectively – but they're pretty easy to ignore.
A couple of weeks ago, >Stephen Fry joined Twitter, posting regular updates of his current trip to Africa, investigating endangered species for a television programme he's making; very quickly the number of people following him soared, and currently stands at around 13,000. (That's a lot of people who are, at any point in time, acutely aware of what Stephen Fry is up to. Odd.) Last week The Independent joined the party, adding three Twitter feeds of its own: >News, >the US election and >sport. Twitter's >search page can often be a strangely illuminating source of information. And if you live in London and depend on the tube network, you can be >notified whenever there are problems on each individual line. (i.e. frequently.)
But perhaps the most telling sign that it might be reaching critical mass is the appearance last week of an independent service called >Magpie. It works on the idea that, if people are following your timeline, the ability to slip advertising messages into said timeline is going to be worth money. So, Magpie tells me that I could currently make 30 Euros a month just by giving them my username and password and letting them occasionally post an advert (prefixed by the tag #magpie) into my timeline. Enterprising, perhaps. But people who use the service are furious that it's being abused (i.e. monetized) in this way, and they're attempting to whip up a campaign whereby if you see a a #magpie message, you should just immediately stop following that particular person. Who knows whether indignant Twitter users will succeed in neutralizing the Magpie effect before it even gets off the ground. But for the moment, it seems to be operating unhindered.
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So the next advertiser along will just post things untagged?
Posted by: John | Monday, 03 November 2008 at 02:27 PM
Surely this was all in the future plan at Twitter HQ? Though they don't let on, they must be exploring monetising, cos they can't keep afloat forever on investors' goodwill. Note the removal of txt updates in large parts of the world (including Europe) earlier this year. Much as I dread the coming of adverts, it - sigh - had to happen.
Posted by: myeral | Monday, 03 November 2008 at 04:25 PM
but isn't it already monetized in the states and canada? Because ppl pay to receive txts?
Posted by: carsmilesteve | Monday, 03 November 2008 at 08:32 PM