Twitter is 30 in Dog Years

Once upon a time you went to your favorite web pages or blogs to see what was up that day.  You got hooked on this and began visiting 3, then 6, then 20 different pages every day.  

That got tedious, so the world came up with personalized start pages and RSS feeds and news aggregators.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or, as my son calls it ‘Really Stupid Stuff' - he, being of the next generation and obliged to discredit old technology, (technologies on the web age kind of like dog years).  RSS is a way web sites found to easily share their information with you even if you didn't go to their sites - something they thought was great.  All you needed was a little program on your computer called a ‘news aggregator' - and these began to flourish in no time flat.

RSS, as a technology, is only 3 or 4 years old by the calendar, but in web years that's ‘like way over 30, dad' (thanks son).   So the next generation demanded something faster, more to the point, and available anywhere - what did they get?  ANS: twitter.

Twitter (twitter.com) started by simply asking the question: ‘What are you doing right now?'  You had to answer that question in a text message of no more than 140 characters (that's a letter for those of you over 30).   You did this on your cell phone using those strange, tiny, abbreviated keyboards, and you used phrases like ‘my bff tiffany'.

The trick was that you could ‘follow' a person - which meant that whenever that person posted a message your cell phone would ‘tweet' and you could see the note.  You didn't have to know that person to follow him or her (something you'd get arrested for in the real world).  And if you saw something that was cool you could ‘retweet' it - that's the cool new word for ‘forward' and it meant send it along to your friends.  So exciting news, say about a girl friend falling face down in the mud at a football game because of her inability to hold her liquor, could spread to hundreds or thousands of people in seconds, causing untold amusement to many and embarrassment to a few.

Soon your computer, and phones that could support it, began ‘tweeting' constantly -the sound has become as iconic as the ‘You've Got Mail' voice.
Well, twitter blossomed, as things will do on the web, and soon became the number one way for the youth to waste time by keeping up with exactly what their friends were doing, and I mean exactly - what they were eating, seeing, listening to, or thinking.   Fortunately the story didn't end there.

Soon people began talking about new events, or including links to cool websites, or bits of news, some became well known for particular topics - like technology, or politics.   And all in 140 character snippets - the ultimate Cliff Notes for current events.  And this stuff was interesting.

In short, your extended friend list became your RSS feed for what mattered to you.  We're now in a world where no new media journalist would be without it.  The Hudson River Plane crash was a great example (see my last post).  
But, and here's the big ‘but' in the whole thing, twitter is getting old fast (in web years).  Too many posts by too many people trying to be handled by a platform that wasn't designed for it.  And the really funny thing is, is that the twitter folks haven't figured out how to make money with it yet and it's costing them a fortune to run and host.

So it just could be that an idea gets funded by Silicon Valley, grows to become the number one thing, then gets over run by the next best thing, all without ever figuring out how to make money.  

I don't think that it will end up this way because there's a bunch of money behind it but I do think it will end up like RSS feeds - part of the larger picture and supplanted by new multi media technology.  New cell phones are full of picture, sound, and video capabilities and the cell phone companies aren't going to sit idly by and let the twitter phenomenon not be monetized - they'll certainly expand on the idea (can't wait for the ‘friends following friends' option plan).

So, join the twittering generation and give it a try before it's dead and gone - you can follow me (please stand back a little) at http://twitter.com/laurenelliott.