The Twitter Post

As I mentioned a month ago, there is indeed rich conversation in Twitter, and that its come close to replacing my Google reader somewhat. Now that Jeremiah has catapulted Twitter onto Techmeme, I find myself with the following thoughts on the matter: Twitter is awesome for nitty gritty conversation and chatter and, its rich with insight specific to the marketing, social media, and tech 2.0 communities. But Jeremiah is not the freaking god of Twitter! Scoble touted is as the new conversation space months ago. Anyway, this it not a rant on Jeremiah...but rather a look at the technographic and cultural shift that Twitter is experiencing right now. From launch until what seems like only a few months ago, Twitter was entirely the domain of the Early Adopter (and their friends). The "conversation," as it were, was primarily a smattering of randomnocity by kids out in Silicon Valley (OH @ Wb 2.0 Expo 2006: "Twitter is stupid, only SV people use it and its going to die on the vine").

About a month ago Scoble noted that the conversation had moved off blog comments and onto Twitter. Again, this would be primarily for the Early Adopter tech 2.0 set. After resurrecting my dormant feed from last April, I began noticing faces from the marketing 2.0 set...Lee Odden, Brian Solis, and of course, Jeremiah. Whats happened in the past month is a swell in numbers of this new kind of marketing pioneer and "social media strategists." The masturbatory chatter has shifted and Twitter has become my finger-to-the-pulse monitoring tool for this community specifically.

I predict (ah, the ever-doomed predictions) a continued swell over the next few months as Twitter enters the Early Majority adoption phase. We'll begin to see more Twitter status' popping up on Facebook profiles of the marketing set, there'll be a flourish of (even more) 3rd party apps, new "best practices" and blog posts..oh yes! the blog posts and panels and presentations of "how to leverage Twitter"...and critical mass will loom in the horizon as Early Majority turns to Late Majority...and as Pownce becomes the new drug of choice for the Early Adopter...hrm.

Oh, but what am I saying...I am getting oh so far ahead of myself. I suppose I'm torn. On the one hand, yes, Twitter has become a wonderful tool for marketers and web strategists and social media gurus to communicate with each other-- on the other hand, I don't want to see the beauty of Twitter, the fragmented monologues, to be lost in the agenda-pushing.