A paradigm shift is defined as a change from one way of thinking to another.
Since the beginning of the Internet we have experienced many paradigm shifts, such as the invention of the browser & World Wide Web, eCommerce, and the various forms of communication that have driven the usage of the medium, such as email and instant messaging.
Whereas the ‘social graph’ or connections one forms on instant messaging or social networks are with people you generally know, or have ‘discovered’ through express contact (albeit anonymous contact in some cases); Twitter-like relationships are a lot more loose and less deliberate. Anyone can be your follower and you can follow anyone on Twitter. This multiparty, broadcast, and immediate-feedback mechanism is extremely powerful! I cant think of an example where this type of communication model has existed before on the Internet.
One could think of twitter as a voyeuristic multiparty IM. The content is also being pushed to you in real-time (as most Twitter users use products such as Feedalizr that pushes the new entries from your network to you). The real power of Twitter in this case, is that anyone can respond to a tweet, and everyone who follows a Twitter user can see responses to tweets of users that they are not yet following. This is inherently viral and creates a dynamic social graph.
Although the initial consumer proposition for Twitter was to answer “What are you doing?” right now, it has turned into something a lot more than just an endless stream of useless information about people’s eating habits during the day, or senseless bits of information that mean little to anybody besides close friends.
What has started to happen around the early adopter community of Twitter is the sharing of content that resides on other sites or networks, using URL links (mostly shortened URL links). This content is also increasingly starting to be created on mobile phones with products such as Twinkle and Twitpic, making it extremely easy to post short links to phone generated content. How this works is that these products store the photo or video on their own servers, and enable you to post a link to that content using a short url on Twitter. If one had to mine all the content on Twitter, you could probably reverse engineer a Facebook -like profile for many twitter users (complete with all photos and videos of one’s entire social graph!
This has created a new type of content discovery which is immediate and which people can tune into without knowing what specifically they are looking for. For instance, when Paul Newman passed on a few days ago, I found out about it on Twitter just hours after it happened, and way before it was mentioned on any mainstream media in this country (South Africa). If you had to extrapolate the usage of Twitter across a much larger audience (i.e. more mainstream adoption), you could easily see why Twitter could be the next Pulse of the Internet (or Twitter-like clones in various countries that are language specific).
Even if Twitter becomes the next Friendster (i.e the pioneer in social networking that was later outpaced by MySpace and Facebook), its inception has significantly pushed the envelope in my view. There is every possibility that a newcomer will come into the market that will extract the essence of Twitter, but make it far more mainstream and far more scalable longer term. What I mean by this is removing the drivers in Twitter which make it an early-adopter product and making it far more intuitive (e.g. removing the command syntax – this is already starting to happen with the Twitter clients out there e.g Feedalizr, Twhirl).
I think that Twitter is by far the most significant thing that has happened on the web this year, the effects of which we will only really feel once this type of technology has become far more mainstream (Twitter has less than 3 million users at present).
This is likely to happen in 2009, so watch this space, you are witnessing a paradigm shift!
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