After talking about how Twitter is a valuable tool for journalists because it’s a great way to get instant feedback and ideas from readers and listeners, she added that Twitter is a:
“Crazy and beautiful thing that may collapse under the weight of its own absurdity”.
Not only is it a great quote but it puts the spotlight on Twitter in terms of infrastructure and ecosystem. Over the past year, Twitter has poured a lot of money (well, their VCs money) into getting its infrastructure in better shape so that the dreaded fail whale makes fewer appearances.
At the same time, Twitter has become more popular with an estimate 32 million registered users. To me, growth rather than infrastructure is Twitter’s biggest challenge.
As more people climb on the bandwagon, Twitter is going to change. It’s going to evolve from a place where great conversations and resource-sharing happens to a medium where corporations, marketers, spammers and other riff-raff are going to be aggressively engaged.
This is, no doubt, going to change Twitter and continue to push stress on Twitter’s back-end systems. For users, it will become more difficult to sort through the “noise” to find the best, most valuable, interesting and entertaining conversations.
You’ll start to see more marketing and promotional activity – some of it blatant and far from the soft sell that many early corporate Twitters users have embraced.
It’s not that I’m against growth or progress but my hope is that Twitter can evolve but still remain an interesting medium that serves a variety of interests and needs.
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Twitter: “A Crazy, Beautiful Thing”
Last night at Third Tuesday in Toronto, Nora Young, the host of the CBC’s popular Spark radio show, was asked during the Q&A about Twitter.
After talking about how Twitter is a valuable tool for journalists because it’s a great way to get instant feedback and ideas from readers and listeners, she added that Twitter is a:
“Crazy and beautiful thing that may collapse under the weight of its own absurdity”.
Not only is it a great quote but it puts the spotlight on Twitter in terms of infrastructure and ecosystem. Over the past year, Twitter has poured a lot of money (well, their VCs money) into getting its infrastructure in better shape so that the dreaded fail whale makes fewer appearances.
At the same time, Twitter has become more popular with an estimate 32 million registered users. To me, growth rather than infrastructure is Twitter’s biggest challenge.
As more people climb on the bandwagon, Twitter is going to change. It’s going to evolve from a place where great conversations and resource-sharing happens to a medium where corporations, marketers, spammers and other riff-raff are going to be aggressively engaged.
This is, no doubt, going to change Twitter and continue to push stress on Twitter’s back-end systems. For users, it will become more difficult to sort through the “noise” to find the best, most valuable, interesting and entertaining conversations.
You’ll start to see more marketing and promotional activity – some of it blatant and far from the soft sell that many early corporate Twitters users have embraced.
It’s not that I’m against growth or progress but my hope is that Twitter can evolve but still remain an interesting medium that serves a variety of interests and needs.