Will 2009 be the year of Twitter?

10th January 2009, 03:40 pm

It’s been a busy week for news this week, but one thing that struck me was the amount of discussion in the press in the UK about Twitter. It started with the broadsheets: on Tuesday, the Guardian asked What are you doing and then on Wednesday the Independent asked Why are we still hearing so much about Twitter. But perhaps today’s article was most interesting, when the Sun asked if you Fancy a twitter with Britney.

The fact that the Sun is now talking about Twitter has great significance for its uptake. Whilst the Guardian and Independent have been talking about Twitter for sometime, they have a combined distribution of just over half a million readers. The Sun on the other hand is the UK’s best read newspaper, with over 2.5 million people reading it every day. It has been proven to provoke strong emotions and have great influence – from their iconic front-page on the day of the elections in 1992 which many claim contributed to the defeat of the Labour party, to the fact that many people in Liverpool still boycott the newspaper after their reporting of a tragedy in 1989. The Sun is perhaps one of the most influential and widely read newspapers in the UK.

So why does this matter and what does it have to do with Twitter?

Whilst many people may be using Twitter, it only becomes really useful as a social media tool when it starts to meet mass adoption. Just like the first fax machine, or the first use of email, Twitter and other social media tools become more useful and more rewarding the more people that use them. They will only really come into their own when they stop being niche and start being popular. To date, I don’t think that Twitter has been ‘popular’ in this, and the common, meaning of the word. It has been something that a large group of people have used and got benefit from, but this group has to some extent been restricted or limited – people who share certain interests or common characteristics of some kind.

The fact that the Sun is now reporting about Twitter suggests that it is starting to gain the kind of mass, or popular, influence that will see it really come of age. Other suggestions of this mass influence include reports that Jonathan Ross, a recently controversial comedian and chat show host in the UK, will use Twitter as part of his Friday Night with Jonathan Ross show when it begins again in a couple of weeks. This is a show that regularly receives around 5 million viewers, perhaps one of the most watched chat shows in the UK.

Social media tools become most useful when they become popular and mainstream. We know that this is happening when they are talked about and used in mainstream media. Twitter seems to have taken a big leap forward in this regard in the UK this week. Perhaps 2009 will be the year it makes it.

Update: Discussion on SocialMediaToday

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16 Comments

Dave Briggs:

I disagree on this one – Twitter is already useful for me and many other people, because our networks are already on it. Even if nobody new joins Twitter from this point on, I would continue to use it, because the people I follow are interesting and informative enough for it to work for me.

Of course, for larger organisations who want to use it as a tool to reach large audiences, it is less useful at the moment. I’m not sure whether this is a bad thing or not, to be honest.
10 January 2009, 8:48 pm
Matt:

Hi Dave,

I’m not sure I meant to be at odds with you here. I also find Twitter useful and I imagine that the vast majority of people on the site do too. You’re right to point out that as a networked experience, the utility I get from the tool depends solely upon my own network. I currently get great use from Twitter as I’m sure many people do.

The point I was hoping to make is that it seems that this year we might see a more mass adoption of Twitter. Reporting and use in media as we’ve seen this week suggests this may be a change that is happening. Whilst Twitter is useful to those who use it, it is still a relatively niche phenomenon – with only 4-5 million users worldwide. But in 2009 I think we will see the total number of people using Twitter, and the number of networks that go with this, increase quite dramatically. I think we will start to see prime time television using Twitter as a means of getting audience feedback or even running competitions; and newspapers taking comment through Twitter into print.

These developments will have to go hand-in-hand with a mass adoption of Twitter. We will need it to become more popular outside the networks that currently use it. I think this will happen and I think that’s exciting. When more people start to use the tool we will together innovate new and different uses for it. Twitter will, I suspect, be used in very different ways by the end of this year as it is at the start. Many people will find that the benefit they personally gain from Twitter will start to diminish as this happens (I would possibly put myself in this group), as new rules and expectations filter into the Twitter user-base. This is unlikely to be a problem as these are the people who are most likely to go elsewhere, use new tools, adopt the latest developments.

So I think that Twitter will gain a mass adoption in 2009 in a way that it hasn’t to date. I think that this is significant and important as it means we will see a real change in the way that the tool is being used – innovation will be ripe. I also think that some of the original users will find that the ways in which they have always used Twitter become less ‘the norm’ and so they may go elsewhere.

I don’t see any of this as problematic, rather as a social media analyst I think this is an exciting development to watch as it shows how mass adoption changes human behaviour, social interactions and the way we use the tools that are at our disposal.

What will probably happen is that some of the earlier adopters will move on, go elsewhere to new tools that are emerging. This also helps the innovation cycle and so is probably a good thing.

Anyway, I think my point is that I agree with you except that I suspect, however much we might like Twitter not to change from what we know and use, it will do. So maybe we should be looking for the next big thing.

Matt
11 January 2009, 10:09 am
Simon Quance:

Agree with you Matt…

I’ve noticed a lot more music & entertainment press referring to and using Twitter in last 2 months…

I also think 2009 will be massive for the network with all sorts of other integrations between social media applications and Twitter ushering it towards the mass market tipping point.

As you point out Twitter will change with mass market adoption and early tech/community adopters may look elsewhere (was ever thus), but it will also help to subtly change the way people communicate and I too find that really exciting, especially as it re-connects people easily around shared interests and themes.

For me it fosters a strange new sense of community… physically dislocated for sure… but community never the less and that’s very healthy.

Simon
11 January 2009, 6:02 pm
First they ignore you… / we are social:

[...] Update: More in a similar vein from Matt Rhodes. [...]
11 January 2009, 9:16 pm
ppmartin:

I also observed an acceleration of the use of Twitter worldwide over the past few months, and I couldn’t agree more with Matt.

PPM
From Hong Kong
11 January 2009, 11:38 pm
Ed:

Thanks for the linkback Matt.

A part of me has been looking into how users adopt Twitter. Even at where I am, news publisher like Channel NewsAsia has adopted it as a platform for content distribution. While adoption often puts a smile on our faces, it pushes me to wonder if Twitter is still into the social connection aspect. Or, is it nothing more than a distribution channel now?

For the latter, what is it that Twitter can do which other existing content sharing tools like del.icio.us, stumbleupon, digg or content aggregators can’t? I just felt Twitter need to be more than a publishing platform (in what we know as micro-blogging) to create their distinctive advantage over others. Just like what I wrote about Plurk, it has created what Twitter can’t.
12 January 2009, 12:12 am
Ian Hendry:

Is it not possible for something to be considered successful or useful if it is only used by a specific community for a valuable purpose (as it has been by the social and old media crowd to spread the word on interesting topics for the last year)? Does success have to mean mass adoption?

I found Skype better when it had a fraction of the users because it wasn’t on most peoples’ radars. Not it is, the service has deteriated and I get much more unsolicited contact. My fear with Twitter reaching the mass market is that it will get the focus of the spammers and hackers too.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
12 January 2009, 10:14 am
MJ Ray:

Twitter doesn’t scale. It’s one company and it’s already throwing away some of my input because it’s too busy. Putting it on national TV at prime-time won’t improve things. We need to go distributed and laconica sites like http://identi.ca/ already own that space. If there’s any justice, 2009 will be the year of OMB.
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