Twitter is the new facebook

The idea that Twitter is taking over as the "next big thing" of social networking hides the fact that Twitter has actually been around for a long long time. Its been around as long as Facebook et al if not longer (I myself can't remember when I signed up, but its definately pre-cocktail throwing). Twitter is suffering the same media frenzy as all the other social networking "phenomenon", its just taken a while to gain its own tipping point and resulting attention of the media.

The profile of Twitter has reached the heady heights of the popular. Famous Tweeters Jonathon Ross and Stephen Fry have been in no small way responsible for its recent attention. That, and underground conversations made public by our very own "can't say textes cos it's not English" Radio Stupid...But in reality this type of microblogging has been going on for some time. Twitter is now so "now" that even The One Show ran a Twitter feature, talking about it in a "we're loving it but don't actually get it" kind of way and trying, as they do, to appeal to all audiences whilst actively pissing most of them off. Twitter has, it seems "arrived".

A growth in Microblogging (which is what Twitterers or Tweeters do) means that where previously we just had information overload, now we potentially have experience overload as well. For me though, any experience based sharing, particularly if it is of an emotional nature, is good...and rarely happens face to face let alone online. A busineness example for instance..."We just got the *** contact, loving you all for your efforts...." - emotional, concise, and plain nice. I read a recent Forrester techradar report on social media (which I won't try to link to due its fantastically expensive nature), in which microblogging was referred to as the next big thing, but not necessarily for business. In fact microblogging is conceptually brilliant for knowledge management but its use is still in the throes of adolescence.

All of these social media tools are like MS Office tools of old (ish), no use in themselves - its what you do with them that makes all the difference....

Current Twittering (or microblogging) for Enterprise 2.0 may be (quite) a long way off but think of the potential - everyone needs a good elevator pitch and this is what microblogging can be - short, sharp, insightful or just plain educational updates with wide appeal which take seconds to read. Unlike this post which is seemingly none of the above...