I posted about a month ago about Twitter/Jaiku – ruminating about the first hostage or other type of mass-interest event where a person intimately involved starts broadcasting messages out. I think this will represent a second tipping point for the service, in terms of mass media interest/awareness.
I guess the idea I was fumbling around with, was that Twitter’s utility is entirely dependent on how interested you are in the people sending updates…and we’ll all be interested in a macabre event like a live hostage situation being played out on Twitter/Shozu/etc. (let me just point out that I hope this never happens!!)
I was reminded of my post by Les Orchard’s rather erudite post yesterday, that spelled out the appeal of Twitter’s little dribbles of innocuous information – basically wedding and baby photos are pretty mundane until it’s _your_ wedding or baby photos…and that Twitter had it’s fair share of detractors because people saw Twitter and dismissed it out of hand because they didn’t grasp the ‘baby photo value’:
bq. “Twitter becomes immensely interesting when it turns out that you’ve amassed a group of contacts who tend to run in similar circles as you, because even their off-handed remarks and random burps have a decent chance of surfacing something interesting or entertaining. When it’s good, this sets up a nice ambient chatter like sitting in a coffee shop filled with just your kind of people.”
That puts me in the former group – I was pretty unconvinced by Twitter, until two things happened. First, I went to Mix07, and wanted to pay attention to various people’s activity etc. – they all happened to be Twitterers, so grabbed a copy of Twitterific and let their attention stream arrive onto my desktop…
I’m convinced – their location, updates and thoughts mattered to me, and I ‘got’ the value of Twitter.
It’s also a superb sms broadcast platform, and I’ve been talking to Matt about using it’s API for broadcasting sms updates to ThinkFold users when their subscribed outlines are updated…i.e. an event of interest to _you_ and you only.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the US located Twitter or Scandinavian Jaiku dominates at Reboot in a couple of weeks..or (my hunch) that neither are used.