*There must be SOMETHING to it, as I'm getting a steady gush of Twitter requests. Haven't seen anything like it since the early friends-frenzy of the social web.
*Furthermore, I'm starting to get useful news from Twitter while my RSS feed blogs down in PR boilerplate from marketers who already "discovered" the now-mainstreamed "blogger revolution."
Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution--A New Radar Report from O'Reilly Communication, Connections, and Immediacy--140 Characters at a Time
Sebastopol, CA—What are you doing? That's the simple question posed by Twitter, the planet's most popular micro-messaging service. Twitter's Zen-like query profoundly and instantly hooked users when it launched back in March 2006. Folks around the globe began telegraphing their status updates in short, headline-length bites of 140 characters or fewer--sometimes called "tweets"--over cell phones and personal computers. Now with some three million-plus tweeting what they're reading, watching, and thinking about, Twitter and similar services appear poised to become as ubiquitous, and as powerful, as instant messaging and even email.
The latest O'Reilly Radar Report, Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy--140 Characters at a Time (O'Reilly, $249, PDF), written by Sarah Milstein, with Abdur Chowdhury, Gregor Hochmuth, Ben Lorica, and Roger Magoulas, and foreword by Tim O'Reilly, probes and demystifies the Twitter and micro-messaging phenomenon for businesses eager to join the micro-messaging ecosystem.
"Although status updates may sound mundane, people on Twitter have found that becoming aware of what your friends, family, and colleagues are doing (without having to respond) leads to a lightweight but meaningful intimacy," explains Milstein. "Sociologists refer to this phenomenon as 'co-presence,' or the sense of being with others. Non-academics, when they have a name for it at all, call it 'ambient intimacy' or, more commonly in work situations, 'ambient awareness.'"
In the Radar Report, Milstein details the impact of ambient awareness and the attention economy on businesses today. The report also surveys the emergent aspects of Twitter and similar services, and best practices for micro-messaging for both internal and external business conversations.
The Radar Report's findings reveal:
How smart marketers use Twitter as a conversational tool for building relationships with customers and potential customers.
Twitter's "stickiness." Not only has the service enjoyed steady growth, but its rate of active users has remained constant at about 20% even as it's spread beyond early adopters.
The power in the channel is still up for grabs. While Twitter has a huge percentage of the nascent micro-messaging market, it has yet to establish any significant revenue streams.
Twitter represents a fascinating evolutionary step in social software, building on the most compelling and useful features of text messaging, chat, and blogging.
The release of Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy--140 Characters at a Time coincides with the opening of Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Nov. 5-7, 2008. Web 2.0 Summit features Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, and a host of web luminaries exploring the theme "Web Meets World."
For a review copy or more information please email peyton@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.
(((In the meantime, LinkedIn is firing its people in a struggle to make some money. Sure you wanna bet the farm on today's booming social networks?)))
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/11/linkedin-to-lay.html