Do you Twitter?
Posted by Jen on September 29, 2008
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?
Penny said
all I know is that when twitter (and plurk) does become mainstream, I will probably not spend as much time on it, like i have done with facebook. I have a small sense of security in knowing that not ALL of my “real life” friends have followed me somewhere on the internet. Which is why I don’t blog anymore…
Becky said
I don’t know if Twitter is mainstream (I don’t think so), but just in case, I follow the same personal rules there that I do anywhere open online: if I really don’t want something to bite me, I don’t post it.
Charley said
I’m not sure if its mainstream or not. I work in a service industry and had to show people about tweetscan and how it is a new way to monitor what the public really likes/dislikes and is currently experiencing.
Penny said
I agree. I have no problem posting under my name. I just enjoy the aspect of the internet that lets me “escape” from annoying RL people.
BarbaraKB said
Interesting. I think Twitter will grow & become more popular but I use it more for business now and Plurk for personal. Why? Probably because I like having one place on line where I can be personal and fun… until my online business contacts find me. But, never ever post something they would find offensive. Ever. Peace!
AndyCast Andy said
I think Twitter has a broad base of people using it than some thing like podcasting or Facebook which may make it seem like ti’s mainstream, but I really don’t think it’s mainstream. Texting isn’t even mainstream here in the US. Email is mainstream. When Twitter is as globally adopted as email, then I’d consider it mainstream.
Twitter still remains to be the domain of the bleeding edge people. Bleeding edge used to be used for computers and phone and ipods but now, I think of it in a more general way. There are people who are bleeding edge in their fields, real estate, emergency service, social networking etc that are using Twitter. I think that’s the way things should be for communication tools such as Twitter and Utterli ( the service formerly known as Utterz) for these tools to be more widely adopted.
The day I get an email saying that MY mom has added me as a follower on Twitter, then we can safely say that Twitter is mainstream.
Great post Jen!