DISQUS

Cass · 1 year ago

From the responses that were listed, it would seem that not a lot of them are very active on friendfeed. To me, there seems to be 2 distinct communities - facebook (more for real-life friends) and twitter (more for online friends). The twitter crowd may overlap with friendfeed, but more people seem to use twitter than friendfeed actively. And if they're active on twitter and use it to update their facebook, chances are that they don't spend too much time on facebook either. Bottom line - from personal observation, I think for active tweeters, the community they spend the most time interacting with would be on twitter. It's simple and flexible, and helps with participation in other more peripheral communities :)

Jesse Stay · 1 year ago

Cass, do you only update on Twitter? Or are you also on Facebook or FriendFeed or some other community. My point here is simply the Twitter community could shift at any time. On Facebook, you have people solely on Facebook. Same goes for FriendFeed, or LinkedIn, or Identi.ca. The Twitter Community does not have as strong a devotion as these other sites.

Cass · 1 year ago

I get what you mean, I suppose twitter has no significant differentiating factor like linkedin or facebook. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but I do think the twitter community has a pretty strong devotion nonetheless, and as each person's community on twitter grows (esp if it is becoming more mainstream), it'll be even harder to leave. Thanks for your thoughts!

Ed · 1 year ago

Hm. I get your point. The concern about focused, committed loyalty from [a] strong community.

I think though, that Twitter is overcoming this by sheer affection of each individual user.
So while that may not be a common bottle of glue shared among them, the tacit aggregated and
underlying sentiment may be that Twitter is the constant, not the variable.
It's the one 'no-brainer' in their connecting as it were.
[I admit that I also *hope* it's this way. There's enough 'love 'em and leave 'em' out there
to make any start-up leery of going all-in only to get dropped of at a rest area next month]

Signed,
TwitterHead for life ;)

johnhaydon · 1 year ago

Jesse,

Great post. I think a lot of bloggers (myself included) are using Twitter as a 2nd RSS or email list. More importantly, many people are using Twitter as their primary tool of engaging other people and developing relationships within a community.

dailypatricia · 1 year ago

Sigh. Twitter is in itself a great example of what device agnostic communications can look like. Essentially, social networking, community, etc. are nothing more than message boards. Message boards have historically been difficult to monetize. I think the market is putting really unnecessary pressure on Twitter to perform from a revenue standpoint when it's so early to market and is a long ways, like many things online, from where the money will roll in. I'd be more concerned about Twitter being able to keep it's popularity and growth than making money. Anybody in the business knows that revenue is basically difficult for anybody. What's their model? In the long run, it'll probably mirror that of past communications/utility companies - they make money off the core service, and then add ons to it. But, it'll take the rest of the market, including the 'influencers' to see this because they don't see the web for what it is yet. Expect many message boards (aka, communications platforms) to rise and fall in this time. In the end, who'll survive in my opinion are those that recognize a spade as a spade and work from there.

The only portal for 'web 2.0' is the web itself. and, it's not done yet.

Jesse Stay · 1 year ago

The interesting thing is that many of the "influencers" are the ones criticizing Twitter and finding other communities. There are still many on Twitter, but the influencers are the most vocal in critique for the service. How long before users go back to the communities they are more loyal to?

Jake · 3 months ago

As of this point in time, I'm learning of communities embracing Twitter. Some schools are sending out updates for their students, and I've heard of restaurants tweeting about their specials to interested customers. There are certain types of businesses that are receiving benefit from the service. Let's hope that Twitter itself can make money without upsetting the many start-ups that rely on their service.