Are you still talking and hanging?

This post is dedicated to my sentiment to this article which Nic had shared with me and a few work mates today aptly titled: OMG! Twitter is, like, so 2008.

A little over a few weeks ago, I had embarassedly admitted I was feeling idle on a Sunday night while ROVE came up interviewing Lily Allen. It was rather an awkward interview with little insights about Ms Allen, then to my horror ROVE had brought up the rise of Twitter.... like a huge majority of the poplulation who is not aware of the technology... This was a perfect sound bite for ROVE and the rise of curiosity has inevitable emerged across many mainstream media channels. It certainly seems like everyone is Tweeting but the question remain why bother at all?

In reference to the Twitter is so 2008 article “It wasn't too long ago that Facebook represented a semi-secret world that belonged largely to those in their teens and twenties. Today, however, the demographic has widened, and it is undeniably part of the mainstream. For better or worse, the space that was once the province of the young has been eagerly colonised by their parents and teachers, not to mention the marketing men with their slogans and special offers.”

I don’t know about the early adopter theory, I mean I am a little over Twitter now because it is largely irrelevant to me, but that's not to say it isn't relevant to millions of others. Also since when does cool or early adoption rule over functionality? Isn't that a bit misleading with the most popular social network.... it is fair to say if the network is decent in functionality and your friends are on it, you will probably not abandone it to join the next "it" thing.

As for my indifference.... I don’t use facebook status for the very reason I don’t want to let everyone suddenly become aware of what I had for lunch or what I am reading…. Will my friends really find it interesting/valuable to know my dietary habits or what I want to buy…? From a corporate point of view, sure it can be a form of PR channel or special DM Channel – perhaps even to organise flash mobs etc. Would be great to use twitter as an illegal party organiser – where profile is obviously set to private for legal reasons, and invitees are subscribed to get updates on the next party (value comes from exclusive info that you can actually use)

For the survival of social networks, as there are so many popping up now, it is probably a good time for networks to really think about what their offering can be of value to their community – like the spotify idea – with music sharing, that is pretty common and there are existing sites that offer similar functions… they should think about partnering with record labels and offer unreleased tracks to the most streamed users as an incentive to use the service more and additional usage means more consumer intelligence the site can offer to the labels. The ultimate problem comes down to revenue or the potential of future revenues....The music industry is constantly battling the online adoption of Music and even major sites such as Youtube and Warner can't get along anymore....

I guess we all just need to be a little patient and see how social media will actually impact our lives before leaving it for the next Twitter.

- jeff