Twitter's Evolution

Recently in class we've spent a substantial amount of time discussing what business platforms and business capabilities are. Earlier today I came across this profile of Evan Williams from Twitter in the New York Times. The article is largely about his decision to transition out of the CEO role at Twitter; however, there were two particularly telling paragraphs talking about Twitter's business transformation as it has honed in on its core capability.

Then - From the article: "The founders likened Twitter to ice cream: not that useful, but “a fun thing for family and friends when they are not in the same place,” Mr. Williams says."

Now - From the article: "Mr. Williams and his colleagues no longer liken Twitter to ice cream. They now describe it as an information network, not a social tool, and see it as an essential way for people to communicate and get information in real time."

Now that Twitter has a more defined sense of purpose, it will be interesting to see how this impacts their launch plans in new geographies.

Making Sense of Twitter in Newspaper Industry

A lot of us and many other out there are still trying to figure out what twitter is and how we can use such a huge amount of information that constantly gets updated and repeated in real-time. If you are following a few hundred people who are very active and tweet very frequently, your twitter stream just becomes a (vertically) rolling news ticker and it becomes frustrating to follow what's going on.

Many start-ups and entrepreneurs are trying to make sense of that information and put it together in a way that can be useful to everyone using the tool, not only to the marketers and self-promoters.

One such effort is http://paper.li

paper.li is a user-created online newspaper that gathers news from the topics or people one follows in twitter. It takes into consideration who is tweeting which story and the popularity of each story and the person who is tweeting it.

While trying to create my own newspaper, I tried to follow Professor Venkat and the website generated this: http://paper.li/nvenkatraman . Check this one out.

Now, it's not a complete newspaper and may not comparable to some other big real newspapers. But this definitely is a step towards how things are changing in the newspaper industry in ways no one ever thought of.

Is Social Media Creating a Culture of Followers?

I read a recent article discussing the idea of Twitter being used by activists to mobilize people for their agendas. Especially in developing countries, the lack of information flow has been a huge problem for enabling movements. Yet, as the cost of computers and technology become cheaper and cheaper, more of the world is able to reach the internet, allowing activists to post images, articles, and other information arguing for their viewpoints.

However, this got me thinking. As accessing information is getting easier, the need for actually finding things out for oneself gets proportionately less. What results is a world using social media to follow others. There will always be people that will actively pursue their causes and find and post information, in an attempt to mobilize the followers. Yet, I believe the number of these people will dwindle down as the ease of spreading this information increases. In other words, people might becoming easier to mobilize, but they are likewise becoming less inclined to become activists themselves.

Just out of curiosity (since I was on this topic), I looked up the top Twitter pages based on rankings. As expected, all of these are celebrity pages and the number of followers is huge and growing exponentially. As we already have a culture that follows the every move of celebrities, Twitter and other social media are making this addiction stronger. This was already a problem of our culture, but with the ease of posting information, celebrities can keep us all constantly posted on everything that his happening, thus enabling us to follow them. This essentially will grow and grow, as supply will always meet demand.