Twitter hasn't just captured the imagination of the tech blogosphere. Even as debates rage whether to cover every little third-party service that interacts with the service, or every minor service update, more mainstream media is starting to recognize the service's potential - taking Twitter out of our little echo chamber world, and into the national consciousness. It's gotten so I'm not just getting bombarded by questions about Twitter online, but from friends and family as well. Last week, I was approached by Gregory Lamb, Staff Writer for The Christian Science Monitor, who wanted to talk about whether Twitter had gone mainstream, if it was worth $250 million, and even if it would be supplanted by more advanced tools, such as FriendFeed.Lamb's article posted this morning, titled, "Twitter’s secret: the law of unintended consequences".
While I've gotten more used to fellow bloggers referencing my posts over the last year or two, getting the attention of such a respected paper as the CS Monitor is humbling. Lamb and I talked for only 10 minutes or so last week, as I walked with Erin Kontecki Vest and Micah Baldwin to our meeting at Lijit headquarters. Luckily, I was able to prove I can both talk and walk at the same time.
Quotes worth noting include the pair below:
"Charging a fee to use Twitter isn’t likely. 'Anytime you have a service that is free, customers are going to expect it to stay free,' Mr. Gray says. Advertising would seem to be a logical next step (Twitter has no ads now), but other social networks have found that users find them intrusive."
Twitter is a “disruptive” technology because it is in “real time,” Gray says. With blogging, “there’s still a lag between when they post and [when] you get it…. If you want to find out something that is happening immediately, the place to go is Twitter and not Google anymore. And that’s revolutionary. And that’s why Google, in my opinion, should be watching this closely.”So... did I get it wrong? Would you pay for Twitter, and should Google not be all that scared of Twitter's growth as part of the real-time Web?
Whether you agree or disagree with my comments, I am glad to see some of the leaders of Web 2.0 surviving and thriving - poised on the verge of breaking out. And Gregory, thanks for reaching out to me. Appreciate it.