How Twitter Changes Changed Us

** Note: This is the first in a series of 2 posts (see bottom for details)

Though Twitter boasted huge changes with regards to its layout and functionality over the past year, the site largely remains the same. Sure – the design changed a bit and now it supports multimedia, but it’s still a single page deal and maintains much of its very original structure.

Most importantly, most of us are still consuming and producing Tweets via third-party apps such as TweetDeck and HootSuite (#amiright?), rendering many of these “changes” relatively insignificant.

What has changed, nonetheless, is the way its users interact with the platform and the nature of content being distributed – not due to Twitter’s own efforts, but to those of its users.

What can we expect moving forward? For starters, we’re facing a whole new world order of communication. I know, I know, everyone says that about everything all the time. But look at it this way – Twitter forces us to condense our thoughts into 140 characters. This means for every thought, we must get to the point right away and exclude any and all fillers… wouldn’t it be wonderful if people actually spoke that way?

Beyond wishful thinking, here are a few considerations we can expect for 2011 and beyond…

Twitter, the new SMS?

Imagine you could contact people at all times of the day, at no cost, from any mobile or computer and without having to remember any set of arbitrary numbers. Oh wait, you can! With mutual following, DMs allow us to have private conversations at any time, from anywhere. With @replies, we can contact whomever without ever having had to exchange numbers or request for friendship. Yes, this means theoretically you CAN contact Justin Bieber. In short -

• Free, unlimited targeted communication (private or public)
• No need for memorizing numbers
• No need for personal devices
• Available at any time, anywhere
• Communication access to any one of the 100+ million people on Twitter

Twitter and Virtual Proximity

Everyone may already be connected to everyone else, thanks to IM, Facebook, and well, the Internet, but Twitter contributes yet another level to interpersonal relationships. Via the platform, we can:

Interact with aspirational connections

Kim Kardashian on Twitter

Prior to Twitter, mortals couldn’t have conversations with luxury brands, celebrities or professional gurus without having to jump through hoops to get a general e-mail address (like info@awesomebrand.com). Now, you can even message Obama with regards to his most recent public policy announcement, message the owner of an organization without having to listen to their painful customer service music while on hold, or alter existing brand campaigns (OLD SPICE).

As TechCrunch put it, “On Facebook, unless you are one of his 5,000 closest personal friends, you aren’t going to find out what Mark Zuckerberg likes. But on Twitter, when Demi Moore tweeted at a suicidal kid, she used the power-law distribution—aka celebrity—to help save a stranger’s life.”

Influence on-stage events from the audience

With Twitter, we can now IM an entire room of people during an event, conference or conference. As the implementation of Twitter feed projections grows, we can now see what others around us are thinking of real-time events without having to wait for post-mortem review. We can, even more significantly, affect what takes place on stage with open curtains.

The possibilities are quite broad, including “tweet the next song we sing” at a concert, “evaluate my talk and determine its direction” at a panel, “submit questions without having to raise your hand and face your public speaking fears,” etc.

Participate in focused conversation groups taking place in real life, in real-time

Maybe we still like poking in real life; that’s why we still have offices and such. But now conversation can take place regardless of whether you are sitting next to others or have the desire to raise your hand. Can’t attend a nearby meeting? Participate in the conversation with a hashtag. Have doubts about a discussion, class, or panel as it happens? Start a meta-meeting (a meeting about a meeting) on Twitter for tangents and related thoughts. Nobody cares about whether or not your body is sitting there.

Twitter: A New Sense of Real Time

It’ll be hard to convince our children that when we were young, we read gray pieces of paper once a day to stay updated with the news.

RSS feeds existed prior to Twitter, but Twitter made them mainstream. More significantly, it changed our focus on main publication names to what our social circle perceives as important, thanks to this new content consumption model.

Yet due to this new sense of real time – and the massive amounts of information being produced and events taking place – Twitter has also given us a new appreciation for how impossible it is to truly keep up with everything. Look away from your Twitter stream for a few minutes (given you have a job, or a life) and headlines zoom out of sight.

In this context, sharing news (via ReTweets) within only a few hours of its publication is considered “being updated.”

Twitter and the Social News Paradigm

Thanks to its users, the initial egocentric focus of “What are you doing right now?” has shifted to “what is going on right now?” That, my friends, was the origin of the personalized social news stream – progressively being adopted by Facebook, Google and the likes. Rather than opening the NYTimes.com for news, many now rely on their social circle – comprised of friends, aspirational connections and responsive editors – for news. The result:

• Curation based on social network rather than big news corporations
• Information consumption by headlines
• News source aggregation

Stay tuned for my next post on what all of this means for digital marketers.

What have you observed as major, impactful changes or developments since the launch of Twitter?

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