I’ve just been playing with Twitter for the last couple of weeks, and slowly I’m beginning to see the appeal.
For those who’ve been on another planet recently, its a social networking “microblogging” site that allows you to leave short messages and updates.
Despite a report by BBC News website (based on a from Harvard study) which indicated that only “10% of Twitter users contribute 90% of the content”, I think this will become even bigger in future. The report also states that an earlier study revealed that “more than 60% of US Twitter users failed to return the following month”.
Facebook also climbed to fame and these days anyone that wants to stay connected on the web must have a facebook account (myself included). But I can’t help being concerned about this trend.
Facebook now dominates the social networking website category and its becoming more and more common to send email via facebook (although there is a long way to go before email is threatened). However, it can’t be denied that reliance on one provider may be risky. What if Facebook network closed tomorrow with no warning? It wouldn’t exactly bring governments down, or cause stock markets to crash, but would cause quite an inconvenience. If their growth continues, this might even become a greater threat.
Sure there are other social networking site like MySpace, but you only have to look at Google Trends to realise what is happening here.
I’m glad to see open source projects like identi.ca bringing an alternative to Twitter, especially as “Tweeting” could easily replace SMS texting over time. For many of us, its cheaper to Tweet than to text. However, I’ve tried to use identi.ca, and whilst I think it shows real promise, at the moment its poses no risk to Twitter.
