At work on Friday, a co-worker came over to me and asked to see my iPhone. He’s a pretty smart kinda guy so I handed it over to let him play with apps and fritter away a little time on a quiet Friday afternoon. He was mostly interested in games and just poking the phone a bit as he is considering buying one. No big deal. As he’s sitting there, fiddling away, he looks up and asks me the very last thing I ever expected to come out of his mouth. “Do you Twitter?”
To be honest, I just kind of looked at him for a few minutes. See, while I do work in an IT field and I am surrounded by geeks of various degrees, they are usually different kinds of geeks than I am. I don’t really get to talk about new media, and virtual worlds and Twitter at work. Finding someone who does understand those things is out of the ordinary at best. And downright weird really. For example, in my humongous agency, I have found a total of 2 people who use Twitter in the past. Two. Now I’m sure there are people I haven’t found yet, but you get my point. It’s not common.
Finally I got my wits about me enough to say that yes, I do indeed Twitter. And that’s when the conversation got even weirder. He told me he didn’t really use it, but he’d just gone on last week and reserved his name. So no one else could get it. No intention of really using Twitter… just saving his name.
I was startled. Has Twitter become so popular that this is what we do now? Is it like domain names, where common knowledge is to snatch yours up before someone else can? Is Twitter mainstream?
I’ve been pondering this all weekend now, and I’m not really sure what the answer is. I know it’s the most popular microblogging or status update or whatever-you’d-like-to-call-it tool out there. I know that it is accessible and usable by folks who are not hard core techy geeks. I know it is popular. But how popular is it?
What are your thoughts? Is Twitter mainstream?
