While I was doing some social marketing research today, my friend Tyler started messaging me about how he thinks that Twitter is just a fad and that it will never become as big as Facebook, let alone Google. He always points out to me that I didn’t like Twitter at first and now I do and that I am just brainwashed or something.
First of all, it is difficult to judge the value of Twitter until you’re actually following people that you want to hear from such as friends or experts in your field. Secondly, I don’t think Twitter is a fad but I don’t think it will ever move into mainstream like email, Instant Messaging never was able to either. Where I think Twitter will become something huge will be in the data it is collecting and the potential social search engine that is being born before our eyes.
When Twitter acquired Summize they fired the first shot at Google and opened our eyes into where they were going with this technology, which isn’t currently making them any money. The value of Google is completely dependent on the quality of their search results. While Google does do a great job crawling the web and finding data quickly, they certainly aren’t my first destination for the “news of now”. That is where Twitter comes into play. When I want to hear what people are saying about Obama’s speech or I want to see the reaction of a trade that just occurred in the NHL, Google is not my destination of choice.
Currently, you would go to news sources that you already know cover that form of news and will have the information you seek. Although I would rather get as many sources of information as possible as well as not having to read through a long article. Twitter will be that destination in the future. Twitter will provide all the up to the second news coverage or information that we demand from the Internet. Not only will they pull data from their own website but they will also pull data from Blogs and other social networks that Google doesn’t necessarily have the ability to crawl. Twitter the technology will soon become Twitter the destination and that is why it is not a fad.
