There’s an old media adage that once something hits the cover of Time magazine it’s already peaked. Well Twitter hasn’t made it there yet but it is in a grandparent friendly non-techie article in the New York Times today patiently explaining how it works for the uninitiated. There’s even the requisite Onion –like quotable section:
“Soon, machines could twitter as much as people. Corey Menscher, a graduate student at New York University, developed the Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time the baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!” Mr. Menscher is now considering selling the product.”
I kicked mommy – how precious!
The attention from folks like Bill O’ Reilly and the gals on The View suggest that Twitter is reaching Octomom or Levi Johnston levels of fatal overexposure. Steve Rubel certainly thinks so over at Ad Age. In his column he declares Twitter to have “peaked” now that the original geek users are being joined by marketing “coaches” and suicide-preventing former Hollywood A-listers.
The hole in this theory is that the geeks on whose tweets the service was built aren’t going anywhere. One of the nice things about Twitter is that Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore can make virtual cow-eyes at each other all day and I can stay perfectly oblivious to it provided I continue to not follow their Twitter-streams.
It’s easy to see where the assumption comes from – after all many of us made the hop from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook. However many of us also made the switch from Alta Vista to Yahoo to Google – the last many moons ago. The fickleness of online loyalty has less to do with geeks fleeing after their hiding spot under the fridge is exposed to sunlight and more to do with how a particular website is able to best serve users.
In this, Twitter’s very simplicity (not unlike Google) is it’s secret weapon. Their basic, simple, open platform has led to a multiplicity of applications that customize the Twitter experience for different kinds of users – from Tweetdeck to Power Twitter to my latest obsession, Yahoo’s Sideline tool. Users don’t have to migrate to a different platform, they transform the existing platform to meet their needs.
The downside to this for Twitter is in the old monetization bugaboo. It’s hard to serve ads, for instance, when a third-party interface is being used to access your site. Building out features also seems a bit redundant when in most cases its simply integrating what I may already have running from a third-party app. This isn’t to say monetization is impossible, merely challenging.
In the meantime there’s no reason to think that Twitter’s growth has peaked. As long as they can pull in enough server power to keep things scaled, the potential for growth on Twitter has, in my estimation, only begun to be tapped.
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