DISQUS

Louis Gray · 11 months ago

Post by Eric Berlin: http://friendfeed.com/ebrage

Ruth Ferguson · 11 months ago

good column

Eric Berlin · 11 months ago

Thank you Ruth !

Ken Sheppardson · 11 months ago

It's self fulfilling. If you post incessantly about service X, guess what... service X grows. It's not rocket science. Feedback look, echo chamber... call it what you will.

Eric Berlin · 11 months ago

I agree that promotion and coverage can help grow an audience (or at least lead to people checking it out)... but doesn't there have to be a "there" there to keep people coming back?

dave · 11 months ago

I'm sure you're all sick of the In The Old Days raps I like so much but...

In the old days we called this phenomenon: Watching them watch us watch them watch us watch other people watching even more people watching us watch the new people we weren't watching before watch the old people watching us watch them watch us watch them watch us.

And then of course when you write the post about that, you have to recite the whole thing all over again adding another layer, and then another and so on.

Ahhhh yes, we did do these things better back in the old days of yore. :-)

Eric Berlin · 11 months ago

Hopefully we're all writing a new chapter of yore together, dave! ;-)

Corvida Raven · 11 months ago

I agree with you Eric. There are so many reasons why people shouldn't shut up about Twitter. What Pete should have asked is whether people are sick of hearing about every single new Twitter app. For me, that starts to become a problem. It's Twitter App Overload (TAO). If people would slow down & post about apps that have the potential to be a key player for some people's Twitter experience, we probably wouldn't worry about hearing about Twitter so friggin much.

Eric Berlin · 11 months ago

Thanks, Corvida, and completely agree. We're at the point where we can use coverage of Twitter apps that add value instead of "here's a new one" posts.

Robert Scoble · 11 months ago

I find it funny that there's two Twitter posts on friendfeed's "best of" page today. THAT is why you'll continue seeing us talk about Twitter. Everytime I write about Twitter I get more traffic.

centernetworks · 11 months ago

lol just lol

Eric Berlin · 11 months ago

Sure, I think there's some of that, but the same is true for any popular topic. I also think it gets a lot of coverage for the reasons I lay out in the piece. :-)

Eric Berlin · 11 months ago

Realized, by the way, that I could have added another sub-head about how Twitter's use during live events, emergencies, breaking news stories is another worthy area of focus in '09.

Jeroen de Miranda · 11 months ago

Agreed, there are still many new areas on Twitter that can be covered by blogging about them. In Europe, Twitter is starting to get more traction (although not nearly at the level in the USA); so I expect more 'major news channels' T(V, newspapers, blogs, ...) starting to cover this new platform.

Eric Berlin · 11 months ago

I love checking out the public timeline on Twitter and seeing all of the non-English language tweets poring through (particularly at night in the U.S.!). Also, one of my favorite websites of ever to check out this phenomenon visually: twittervision.com

ChangeForge | Ken Stewart · 11 months ago

Eric, great write-up and perspective on Twitter, and its place in our bold new world. While I don't completely agree with all o f the applications of Twitter I have seen, some of the more notable uses are quite astounding. It's like a massive ticker tape of life events happening... and could very well become as massive as how other nations adopted text messaging... But this wild adoption requires distribution.

To your point, the API certainly spawned much of this! We shall see what happens, but so long as they can get/keep their act together on developing and innovating they will be around for awhile. Let's just hope they get that act together.

Eric Berlin · 11 months ago

Thanks Ken! What would you advise them to do in terms of getting "that act together" ?

ChangeForge | Ken Stewart · 11 months ago

You know, that is too long to post here... that sounds like a good follow-up article ;-)

Eric Berlin · 11 months ago

It does indeed!

Craig · 11 months ago

If Twitter steadily begins to become mainstream, the talk about Twitter is only going to double. Like you mention, there are new apps developed everyday and new findings about Twitter and its usefulness. How often do they talk about Facebook, or Google? Everyday! Twitter talk is going no where.

Anthony Farrior · 11 months ago

It's a matter of over- saturation and Twitter is no way near there yet. Once I hear my local news channel offer their follow id or when my favorite pizza shop tweet me the daily specials, only then will we know twitter is mainstream and therefore not print worthy...

Eric Berlin · 11 months ago

Haha, I love that !

Alan · 11 months ago

I think that the potential to go "mainstream" may destroy the community and dilute audience. I mean the key to success of a media project is a good audience. I worked in online popsci magazine: we attracted traffic that was really weird and smart people abandoned discussions.
And if we are talking of social network why need another one, since FB is going so fine?
Thanks for the article, Alan

Agitationist · 11 months ago

Another view on the mainstreaming of Twitter. It's pretty scary:
http://agitationist.com/twitter-officially-goes...

RobynMcIntyre · 11 months ago

There is nothing I can add to this great post, Eric. Probably a lot of lurkers out there feel the same.

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