Twitter is a massive signal. It’s still at least half kludgy, it’s nowhere near end-state but – the idea is going to be big. I’ve been thinking of this signal since in came across strongly in my Dead Media workshop at Lift07. But in just the last few weeks Twitter has so exploded that we really have to start talking about it. Now, Twitter Inc. could just be the first signpost, but the signal itself is a monster.
I don’t know what to call this phenomenon that encompasses “status-casting” the facebook status, twitter, jaiku, what we used to used to the msn messenger handle for (poor msn messenger, once huge in Canada, now all but a dead media…)
When we were talking back at the Dead Media workshop we asked, twitter – what will it kill?
consider this: Will Twitter kill blogging the way sms messages “killed” voice conversations?
And what’s so great about being pervasively bombarded with short cryptic blurblettes from everyone you know what the most random intervals? The reason why, is that twitter is an incredibly lightweight way to suck in the momentary “context” of everyone you know (scratch that, of every geek you know) with only a slight distraction cost. hint: the key is to get twitter onto your gtalk and/or mobile device.
It’s like socially, your field of awareness just grew by 3 sizes.
It’s funny how, while everyone assumes that the killer app is always a richer medium that, oftentimes , it is the lowest bandwidth new media that end up killing. Just as sms, “kills” voice calls and hell, how we’re all still wondering why we don’t have videophones for 30 years now?
Even rss is like this, it’s a medium designed to filter out all nonessential (mostly visual) input down to the essence of the desired signal itself. The river of news. Please, just the facts ‘mam.
This thought ties back to my theory on all media. Media is what we use to leverage our scarce time, physicality and immediate context. Our time, place and capacity for sensory input is finite, but our attention has plasticity. Through media, the more we can compress each signal coming at us (in the traditional definition of the word signal) the more capacity for aggregate attention that we gain.
Now go learn to stop worrying about the fuzziness or the inadequacy of any media to capture all meaning – and learn to appreciate this as media’s greatest enabler.
Significance for the Enterprise? Is just beginning.
