Twitter: What’s happening? Death of traditional information media companies

I think that Twitter made a great move by changing their tag line. I doubt that three years ago they were foreseeing that they had created an information network. Projections are that there will be 18 million users by 2010, that's about 12% of internet users.

There are many reasons to use Twitter. For one it can be fun. There are hilarious posts out there. But this is not the main thing it morphed into. As often, crowds have appropriated this new communication medium and made it what it is now: a unique real time information network. Because of its reach, ease of access (even in countries where acess is restricted by using proxies) and most of all instantaneousity Twitter proved to be a great way to communicate many to many and share information as it happens. We've seen it with the wild fires in San Diego in 2007 and people posting info about what they could see in their streets, with the recent Iranian elections and protesters organizing themselves using Twitter. One more example today with Tiger Woods car accident: the info was available on Twitter 45 minutes before CNN put up a breaking news. One last example, closer to home: a few months ago I was waiting for a friend coming from London to Paris using the Eurostar. Four hours after the scheduled arrival time, still no news from her. Nothing on the Eurostar's website either. So I turned to Twitter and sure enough I got info from people stuck in the trains and talking about electrical problems. It's the CB radio of the 21st century. With a platform where everybody can post and listen.

So this new tagline will hopefully help people understand what Twitter is about, better than the old "What are you doing?". Twitter is not a social network. It's an information network. Granted there is some filtering to do to find relevant information but the community is getting organized, using hashtags for instance and the platform is adding new features every day. This is the new preferred way of communicating: many to many. With self monitoring by the community. Think Wikipedia or eBay ratings. That is were marketing will need to get closer to sociology to understand how to communicate with their customers. They won't trust a brand just because of pretty ads anymore, no they trust and listen to each other.