:talkingfuture.com Come and learn about the future…

Martin: The media’s latest internet darling is Twitter. I say latest because there seems to be a cycle in which the mainstream media (newspapers, tv, radio and the BBC) pick up a website, application or device and mention it at every opportunity and integrate it into as many unrelated things as they can. A good indicator of this is BBC Radio 1. The new tech fad will come along and all the DJ’s will start to mention it in every show and the news bulletins will feature stories about how this new fad will save your life or ruin the world. Eventually they will pick up a new fad and the current one will begin to fade. I have observed this pattern with eBay, Myspace, YouTube, Facebook and now Twitter.

In the mainstream media Twitter has taken the spotlight off Facebook. This means that now Facebook will have to survive without constant advertising, whilst you won’t find me booking my face anytime soon, I’m sure it will survive just fine. Everybody else seems to survive after the initial bump of media interest fades away and they got on with the business of making a living and many billions of dollars.

So, finally getting to the point of this column – Twitter is currently in the mass media darling phase, after that it will be dropped for something else (talkingfuture.com perhaps) in the affections of mainstream media and go on to survive for many years. But will it simply be a service that some people use like Myspace or will it make a difference to the way people live their lives. Initially I would have said no to this. Recently though I have started to see it a little differently, if it is used properly. using it as an extension of a current blog or content provider it is a very useful way of adding frequent small amounts of content to keep an audience interested in what you have to say. It could be a useful addition to this site if we could add little bits of thoughts without having to go through the process of writing a weekly column about them and helps to engage our readers to become regular readers of the main site.

A more Cringely-esque possibility for Twitter is that it gets bought by Google. There have been a few news events recently that have got coverage from people at the scene tweeting about whats happening. If Google buy it and apply some of their search magic they have an instant super fast citizen powered news service. This has to be the holy grail for Google in getting more people through the door and looking at adverts while they find out about a plane crash or Presidential Inauguration. I’m sure that someone has tweeted about virtually everything that has been Googled meaning that Google could significantly multiply the amount of data that they can give you while you look at those enticing adsense boxes.

What do you think about twitter then Thomas? Useful tool or used by tools?

Thomas: The best thing bout the Internet is the passing fads! You seem to have missed out one of the most important fads from your list, it’s one that nearly all large corporates have embraced, including the BBC, and it’s one you yourself have committed too. It is of course, the humble Blog! Once upon a time the best a home user could get was a personal website hosted on Geocities that even your friends and family couldn’t be bothered to look at, and then all of a sudden we added a date stamp to the posts, called it a blog and it was a bona fide global internet fad. From the figures I could find it was due to peak in 2007 and then sort of level off, a bit like you’ve predicted for Facebook and MySpace. I’m not so sure that’s going to apply to Facebook, however. I don’t use it myself, I prefer to stick to email, but I do know people who have binned email altogether in favour of using Facebook to communicate. Of course, it means I can’t talk to them any more but in some cases that may not be such a bad thing.

Twitter seems a bit different from recent internet fads, like the Facebook and the Myspace. Both of these were about bringing a richer multimedia experience to the users, where as Twitter strips it back to the very basics of raw text. I really like the idea of cutting out the excess and getting straight to the detail, it reminds me of the olden days when everyone on the Internet knew each other and we didn’t need fads to keep us occupied. I don’t know if that’s what makes it resonate so well with the masses, or if it’s because all the hot celebs are using it to communicate with the “normo’s”.

Hopefully, for the owners of Twitter, they will be able to work out how to make money out of it or sell it on for more than it is worth before the fad has peaked. That’s the main aim of all these social networking site, of course. Get as many people as you can looking at it, then either make them look at adverts or sell it to someone who will make them look at adverts.