Seeds of a Meme

Look people, this is not a culture war, everyone does not need to be on Twitter.

Today, there was a firestorm of posts about Twitter, spawned by the assertion that Twitter's bandwidth needs far outstripped its ability to pay for additional scale.  Jason Calacanis cried "bullsh*t" on that and posted three ways that Twitter could make money tomorrow.

A lot of other posts popped up around this.  Many of them centered around a comment on Jason's post by Anthony Brown:

When getting management at the San Francisco Zoo on board, there was some issues with; "Twitter being too much of a niche demographic." I then explained that this is just the beginning, everyone will be twittering soon.

This really worked its way into my brain.

I do not think everyone will be Twittering soon.  And if they do, Twitter will collapse under its own weight - for the company and for users alike.

Twitter has been called a conversation ecosystem.  It is actually part of a larger conversation ecosystem that includes .. well .. everything.  Blogging, Facebook, email, chats at a coffee shop, daydreams.

I see Twitter as a plankton layer-level of the ecosystem.  Every animal on earth does not need to eat plankton, but without plankton we'd all be in a world of hurt.  "Everyone twittering" seems like an absolute nightmare.

Everyone will not be twittering.  Everyone will not be blogging.

But conversations will start in one medium and move to another and then another.  From Twitter to blogs to mainstream media to public discourse.  Twitter and its successors will seed the conversations of the future.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, bold claims, overstatements, conversation ecosystem, jason calacanis, anthony brown

Comments

[Edward Vielmetti]

Twitter has a certain carrying capacity, both for humans (how many people you can follow) and as a system (how it can scale gracefully and socially under increased load).

There is some weird 2d space where you can plot instant message, twitter, and IRC. For me, twitter was a better IM system but not as good an IRC system as full blown IRC. (And then I remember why I like to write in paragraphs sometimes.)

I say "weird 2d space" because there are several elements of Twitter (message persistence, portability across mobile and IM networks, multicast) that aren't in either of IM or IRC, and thus the user experience is colored by those as much as it is by the structure of the communications space itself.

Some of us probably feel now like those old Victorians felt, deluged with telegrams and postal mail.