The Year of Twitter

by Patrick Ruffini :: January 29th, 2008 2:17 pm

Over the last week or two, I’ve been noodling on the idea that 2008 could be the year of Twitter in the way that 2007 was the Year of Facebook and 2006 was the Year of YouTube.

Well, it looks like this may not be so farfetched. Last night, Twitter crashed, overloaded by live reactions to the State of the Union:

First Macworld, now the State of the Union. Several times during tonight’s SOTU address Twitter’s servers were overloaded, preventing users of the popular micro-blogging service from sending or receiving tweets for several minutes at a time.

A scan of Twitter’s public timeline during the speech showed a number of tweets about Bush’s (hopefully) last address to Congress. Personally, I got a flurry of tweets commenting on the speech from the people I follow on Twitter.

While these spikes reveal some troubling capacity issues that Twitter will need to deal with, this is the surest sign that the service has gone mainstream in a way not anticipated by its founders.  

After Twitter had its big coming out at SXSW 2007, it was kind of a joke. You were supposed to use it to answer the question “What are you doing?” No answer was trivial or mundane enough. Even many of the digerati I knew were slow to jump on the bandwagon, preferring to keep the details of their breakfast that morning to themselves.

But as with most Internet phenomena, users hacked Twitter into something completely different. Now, it’s the first place I turn to if I need a quick question answered, and for raw political intelligence. In a way, it follows in the footsteps of the early blogosphere, which was originally teenage girls blabbing about high school life but really took off as a platform for political discourse.

I now receive way more “follow” requests on Twitter requests than I do adds on LinkedIn or Facebook. My number of Twitter followers (266) is approaching my LinkedIn network (358), and this year I wouldn’t be surprised to see it overtake my RSS subscriber base (528) and my Facebook network (732).

Here are the vectors I see converging on a big year for Twitter:

The Presidential election. Twitter has proven its chops as a platform for live political coverage and commentary. From the Iowa Caucus experiment, to journalists like Ana Marie Cox, John Dickerson and Marc Ambinder using it from the trail, to peak loads during key political events, users have made Twitter a marquee political tool in the biggest political year. I would liken its growth curve to blogs in 2004.

Open architecture. Unlike Facebook or OpenSocial on MySpace etc., Twitter was open to outside developers from the start. Its API allows easy access into and out of the service. Twitter would not be as valuable an experience without Twitterfeed (allowing me to syndicate this blog and my various social networks) or Google Talk integration (making it as seamless as IM). The increased visibility I’ve gotten from Politweets, which aggregates Twitter postings about the Presidential candidates has directly contributed to my increased exposure on the network. The Twitter community now feels as dynamic as Facebook did last summer.

It fills a void. Traditional news operated on a 24-hour cycle. Blogs shortened this to minutes and hours. Twitter shortens it further to seconds. It’s not right for every piece of information. It’s certainly not well suited for longer analysis. But when it comes to instantly assembling raw data from several sources that then go into fully baked news stories, nothing beats it.

I got the inspiration for doing the Iowa reporting from a minor earthquake in the Bay Area last fall. One evening, several people within seconds of one another typed “Earthquake” or something to that effect. In less than 2 minutes, someone had posted the USGS record of event. The whole story was wrapped up in less time than it took the first wire story to hit. And unlike a news story or even a blog, I can ask real time questions of those experiencing an event and get real time answers.

Twitter fundamentally changes blogging. Blogs will always have their place — there’s no way I’m cramming all of the above into the 140 characters I’m limited to on Twitter. But it open sources the process of developing ideas and gathering news tips, giving us a complete window onto the news cycle. For all of these reasons, I think Twitter could be the breakout technology tool of Election 2008.

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