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.

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”?

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