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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October 7th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Some people see twitter as a merging of IRC, blogging and social tools.
October 7th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I think calling Twitter a paradigm shift is an overstatement of note. As Paul mentions, there are several other technologies (like IRC, which has been around since the 80s) that allow a person to broadcast themselves to a mass audience, a) without the silly limitations that come with Twitter (e.g. 140 chars) and b) with greater functionality like DCC and rich text.
Sure, Twitter outstrips older technologies in terms of ease-of-use and how easily it integrates with other services — such is the Web 2.0 paradigm — but that doesn’t constitute a paradigm shift in the same senses that VoIP and IM do.
October 7th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Hi John. Really like the critical analysis you have put forth here. I personally find the “endless stream of useless information about people’s eating habits” to be one of the downsides of the whole facebook/twitter phenomenon. Whereas we could be spending our precious time more constructively, a lot of it is spent merely filtering out the overwhelming content that comes our way.
Here are a couple of posts from of our blog writers about social networks, which I found to be thought-provoking:
http://www.bahaiperspectives.com/tag/social-networks/
Best,
Nadim
October 7th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Neil thanks for your comment, but I do not agree that Twitter is like IRC.
True, IRC is more of a broadcast medium, but you dont spend your day watching the activity on an IRC broadcast and I therefore think that IRC is a far more synchronous that twitter. You have to be “tuned in” so to speak.
Also IRC does not have a built-in social graph in the SNS sense of the word, you join an IRC chat and once you have finished watching it, you leave. Maybe I havent used IRC since the 90′s and Im out of touch with new developments, but this is not as far as I know how IRC is used.
So Twitter has a completely different usage that is both asynchronous and always on.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
In my opinion the term paradigm shift is not quite accurate. YouTube, Facebook and My space ( to name a few) brought about a paradigm shift in the way people socialized online. Twitter did not have the same impact. It was launched late 2006 and has only in recent times started to hit the curve of popularity exponentially It has taken time and education to get users to understand the product.
So lets call Twitter a delayed paradigm adjustment, popularity is in the eye of the beholder. If you and yoru peers are engrossed in it, to you it may seem like a a paradigm shift, but education and marketing may help the curve spike faster.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Brennan I agree and hence why the article says “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).”
October 7th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I’m leaning towards Neil’s point of view on this one. I’ve always thought of Twitter as “IRC-like” in that my twitter feed is simply a global IRC chat onto which I’ve applied filters (people I follow). Each person’s twitter stream then simply becomes their own customized view into that chat room. I don’t disagree that it’s a great web app (I use it pretty much all day), but the way in which people are using it is pretty much as a big chat room. I think what is more interesting than labeling twitter as a paradigm shift (because I don’t believe it is) is in looking at the way in which people are using it. The creators may not have planned for Twitter to be another vehicle for idle chat, but that’s certainly how a lot of people use it. Water coolers, twitter…. it’s all conversation.
October 7th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Agree with Neil and Allan here on Twitter being a morphed version of IRC. Blogged about this last week: http://www.jasonelk.com/?p=22. Twitter = IRC with a permanent archive.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
I’m in no way saying that IRC and Twitter are alike in usage. Besides — IRC is a protocol whereas Twitter is just a web service. I am saying that they both satisfy the human need to broadcast one’s self, particularly to like-minded people, and to be acknowledged.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I look at it quite differently. In essence it is this constant update of where your friends are and what they are doing. this might not be new but is now more mainstream than ever. I also believe that the technology for this will improve dramatically, including GPS and virtual presence detection to name but a few. Is it a sustainable business model, I don’t think so! Microsoft bought into Facebook at 15 billion, one year later the founder struggled to cash in at 3.75 billion, why? bad revenue growth. Then the key question is this here to stay as a mainstream business or as a peripheral add on to something else. I personally think that the current global financial crisis will cut deeper and longer than what You and I are willing to believe right now. Why do I mention this, I think this may very well kill a lot of free internet services and as such I do not believe a standalone business like twitter will survive, but as an add on to QQ or Mail.ru, yes there are enough single child people out there that would require a constant friends feed on all devices possible.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
@Jason “Twitter = IRC with a permanent archive.”? I’ve seen IRC servers with pretty permanent archives. Not publically accessible, but permanent nonetheless.
All that twitter really did was take microcommunication (exactly like IRC or Jabber), and demystify it. I remember how daunting my first foray into mIRC was – it’s not exactly 100% non-tech-savvy-person friendly. However, with de Tournay’s work in creating pJIRC, I think that IRC would have become much more “mainstream” if given enough time.
One of the downsides to the great and open and free and almighty Twitter (or Facebook), is that there is no such thing as content moderation. Even if the admins get involved, people can duplicate and spread content so fast, it’s virtually unstoppable. This is where IRC is vastly superior.
And given the sort of damage that can be done to brands (and people) by malicious and disenchanted users, moderation is a good thing. And no news spreads like bad news.
All that Twitter really serves as is Yet Another Communications Tool. Essentially, the only people that end up deriving any sort of value from it are the megalomaniacs like Scoble that lord their superior fanbase over you, and the New Media types that have DSL and time to waste. There never was a problem with using a blog to broadcast your daily activities, nor an RSS reader to stay in touch, nor a comment box to provide comments/feedback.
The _only_ value I ever got from Twitter were a few odd URLs that ended up being posted to Muti anyway. Other people have had little instant debates/discussions (mostly about marketing) – and they were severely hampered by the ridiculous 140 character limit.
So no. The major paradigm shifts probably occurred back in the BBS days, when normal people were suddenly able to discuss things with people from around the world in centralised forums, as well as share pages, thoughts, pictures, etc. All that’s changed from there to now is the amount of Javascript we use and the amount of people that sign up.
And as Antonie mentioned – the business models suck. The only companies that can really sustain social platforms like Facebook/Twitter/whatever are the ones with diversified portfolios that are raking in profit from other sectors.
~ Wogan
October 8th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Just to riff on some of the ideas above. I have been reading Marshall McLuhan again, particularly “Understanding Media” and doing a bit of side reading on the idea of media ecology. Trying to place some of my ideas about the web in ‘context’.
Within this context Twitter is not so much a paradigm shift as a natural result of the ‘Status’ in Facebook, as Facebook is a natural result of IRC and IRC a result of BB’ing. On a continuum of hot to cold media one can place Facebook as a hot medium and Twitter as a cold medium as exemplified by: “A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be “hot”, intensifying one single sense “high definition”, demanding a viewer’s attention, and a comic book to be “cool” and “low definition”, requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.”. “McLuhan observes that any medium “amplifies or accelerates existing processes”, introduces a “change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association, affairs, and action”, resulting in “psychic, and social consequences”.
As such Twitter creates a unique media ecology. A ‘cool’ one requiring ‘much more conscious participation..to extract value’. To borrow the phrases, to ‘extract value’ or ‘the essence’, one needs to study the ecology of Twitter, the social and psychological effects to see the essence of this ‘conscious participation’ where it might be leading and thus achieve a head-start on what might possible. The answers one would be looking for would then be: do applications like Feedalizr facilitate this extraction of value and if not what is required? Is there a business model for Twitter or is there a business model for the ecology that Twitter creates, within the changing “human association, affairs, and action”?
October 8th, 2008 at 7:08 am
@Wogan Don’t forget Beltel inbetween
October 8th, 2008 at 9:09 am
@Jason and all those other weird and wonderful solutions, lol.
November 12th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I think the one thing that has been missed in this discussion about Twitter is the strength of it’s character limit function. When I first began to use RSS feeds I thought this was going to be the best way to keep up to date with news, but the truth is that it just became an information overload after subscribing to more than 15 feeds, this is because they are unlimited.
After using Twitter I realised that the character limit forces “broadcasters” to get right to the point with their tweet and this allows followers to have a simplified high-level view information search which they can then drill down into should they be interested. This simplified info can then be ported to various apps of your choice, which is pretty much standard 2.0 these days.
So ultimately I would say that Twitter has found it’s niche here in respect to the the web 2.0 paradigm shift.
November 28th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
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