The Twitter Micro-culture hits main stream and now the geeks wanna go home

3 Aug 2009

It’s pretty common to see this type of pattern. Usually it’s us geeks who get there first. We were the first to chat online, we had email and digital cameras first, heck, who do you think it was that made online porn go mainstream. Early adopters, or internet pioneers as the more pretentious ones like to call it, are usually the same folks.

Something cool comes along, we pass it along our own little channels, it grows and grows, and eventually someone who isn’t wearing taped up glasses and high water pants notices. That’s what happened with Twitter. I hate to break it to Matt Stenning, the author of the post “Is Twitter Losing Respect?”, but your little special place of geekness was lost long before Trends got screwed up or Direct Message Spam. I can breakdown the spiral in two words: Ashton Kutcher.

But there is something interesting, in this reality, the spiral doesn’t go down, the spiral goes up. Instead of being an internet celebrity with 5 figure followers and moderate notoriety on Digg or Engadget, now the real stars have showed up with 7 figure followers and brought their fans with them.

It was over when they started giving out Twitter IDs on the nightly news, or when every event known to man had a feed. But over isn’t over. Over is the beginning of a new type of social media. Twitter made micro-blogging matter.

The reality is that Twitter has a user base now. And that user base could care less if @JohnReese, @MikeFilsaime, @ChrisBrogan and @ProBlogger took a flying leap off of a mountain. Between the four of them, and their 219k combined followers, they pale in comparison to Oprah’s nearly 2 million.

Those four combined don’t have 1/4 of the followers of the bottom of the top 100. Reality check folks, you were a big fish in a small pond. Just because you can’t keep up, doesn’t mean it’s over.

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5 Responses to The Twitter Micro-culture hits main stream and now the geeks wanna go home

Matt Stenning

August 3rd, 2009 at 5:58 pm

It’s alot easier for people like Ashton and Oprah to get millions of followers because they are in the mainstream media always promoting their accounts.

The same will start to happen when Google Wave is released, it will be good for a year or so until the IM’ers decided to use it for just marketing practices.

Matt

Jason Burns

August 3rd, 2009 at 8:04 pm

@Matt: Yea, I hear ya. It’s just interesting that someone like Darren, who uses Twitter purely as a marketing tool, would find himself quitting Twitter because of all of the marketing on there. I mean, it’s counter productive. That says “Use me until I am big enough to really be valuable, then quit and find something else small to take it’s place” The big names are on there, and have drug millions of people on with them, sure 99% of those people might not care about blogging, or social media, but the 1% that does infinitely expands the pool of potential readers for someone like us. The magic is making sure that Twitter doesn’t get complacent and keeps up with the growth making it easy for those people to find us. Now isn’t the time to bolt, now is the time to drive change and make sure the platform has value to marketers of all sizes.

Nick Stamoulis

August 4th, 2009 at 6:22 am

It is really unbelievable just how much power Twitter has acquired in the short time they have been around.

Jason

August 4th, 2009 at 3:27 pm

I feel that with twitter there has been a lot of contraversy over what is going on. There has been a lot of new technology that has been comming out in the past two years. It’s just like with the Iphone that macintosh came out with. Ever since the iphone came out there has been a lot of people who want to get them one. I personaly don’t see the need for all of this craze for technology. I am a computer geek but the technology keeps changing. So by the time you get the iphone there is something else that is new and better. Of course some of the computer software that is comming out is ok but it has some bugs that need to be worked out. When vista first came out they had about 2 recalls. Twitter is becomming more and more popular as months go by. It is becomming as popular as ebay. You can also go to google and look for things as well. I think before long twitter could be as big as amazon. Twitter when twitter first came out they didn’t realize how fast it was going to take off. Another great thing that has come out as a search engine is bing.com Every day they show a diferent pictures of things around the world. I think this web site has also taken off very fast as well. If it wasn’t for all of these then people wouldn’t be able to check things out on the web with the confindence that they feel, while they are engaged with the material that they are looking at. With the world constantly changing the way we look at things on the internet and how we are getting there. Before these metacrawler was a very big search engine and now google, yahoo, and bing is starting to get there as well. I think twitter is almost tied with these but I don’t know exactly how close it is since it just came out not to long ago.

Angeline @ marcus evans scam

September 4th, 2009 at 4:46 am

Yes twitter is losing respect by giving privileges and causalities in every aspects.. It would be better if twitter takes up feed back from the good users and customize the application.

Angeline @ marcus evans scam