Most, when hearing of Twitter for the first time, merely shake their heads with a response that includes phrases like “I don't get it,” “that's stupid,”and “I don't have the time” (my personal favorite is, “It sounds too much like diddler”). And yet, few would deny the power of Facebook now, the fourth most trafficked website on the Internet, but many used the same words and phrases in response to Facebook when they first heard of it one or two years ago.
Janssen-Cilag's Twitter-like microblogging tool on the corporate intranet
(source: Nathan Wallace, Associate Director - Information Technology (Jitter: Experimenting with microblogging in the enterprise)
Here are some facts about Twitter:
2.7 million U.S. visitors in December (U.S. only) a nearly eight-fold rise in one year (Nielsen)
666,000 U.S. users accessed Twitter on mobile devices in December (Nielsen)
One in five (20%) of 18 to 34 year-olds have tried Twitter or a similar service at least once (Pew Internet Life)
The median age on Twitter is 31, older than Facebook's 26 and MySpace's 27 (Pew)
Approximately 5-10 million registered users (best guess depending on the guesser; Facebook has 150 million users, and LinkedIn 34 million) (PC World)
For Interent users, the evolution of Twitter is best described by MinXuan Lee (@minxuan) in the 5 stages of Twitter Acceptance (How Twitter Changed My Life):
Denial: “I think Twitter sounds stupid. Why would anyone care what other people are doing right now?”
Presence: “OK, I don't really get why people love it, but I guess I should at least create an account.”
Dumping: “I'm on Twitter and use it for pasting links to my blog posts and pointing people to my press releases.”
Conversing: “I don't always post useful stuff, but I do use Twitter to have authentic 1x1 conversations.”
Microblogging: “I'm using Twitter to publish useful information that people read and converse 1x1 authentically.”
Twitter is changing the face of social media, which in-turn has reinvented the Internet. The story of U.S. Airways flight 1549 landing in the Hudson River was broken on Twitter, more than 10 minutes before CNN had the story. Ditto the Mumbai bombings which triggered an onslaught of 'tweets' at an estimated rate of 900 per minute during the height of the crisis.
As I write this, Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds, and so to is my list of followers (Barrack Obama just became a follower... must be a bot). To put it in a business context, a Network World survey of 583 IT execs found that 84% said they visit social networking sites on a regular basis, up from 68% last year; 64% use those same sites more than they did one year ago.
As it transforms social media, Twitter is helping to reinvigorate the corporate intranet. At Prescient Digital Media we use a Twitter-like platform called Yammer. It's free to use and myself and other staff are using it to keep abreast of each other's work and activities.
Other
companies are rolling out their own microblogging platforms for
employees. Janssen-Cilag
Australia & New Zealand launched an internal
microblogging platform called Jitter. “Combined with our intranet's
people search capabilities, this formed an interesting enterprise
hybrid of Facebook &
Twitter style capabilities,”
writes Nathan Wallace, Associate Director - Information Technology
for Janssen-Cilag (see Jitter:
Experimenting with microblogging in the enterprise
). This new intranet microblogging solution garnered them a Highly
Commended in the 2008 Intranet Innovation Awards.
The future for
Twitter is extremely bright: they've turned down one US$500 million
offer from Facebook, undoubtedly several other big offers, and are
undoubtedly worth well north of $1 billion. Twitter has just raised
an additional US$35 million in venture capital and no doubt has some
big plans for that cash, but is so far remaining hush and humble about
the plans and their success to date.
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tobyward
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