Twitter reaches way beyond 140 characters
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 7:12AM I found this article by Fred Wilson very interesting, and it confirms something I have thought for some time. Twitter is more than just 140 character echo chamber of "who's having what for lunch". It has become a distribution system for information, mostly based on shortened hyperlinks, and it has a highly leverage eco-system that extends well beyond Twitter itself.
According to Wilson, and the statistics from my blog reinforce this, each link that originates in Twitter, is clicked 3-5 times more from other areas of the internet. Facebook, email clients, twitter applications, and twitter widgets on other website pages. So interestingly, even if you dismiss Twitter.com, you can't dismiss that the millions of "Tweets" which are handled by the company, are rapidly becoming part of the internet's basic infrastructure.
All of this confirms that if you have a following on Twitter, who care about what you have to say, you have SOCIAL LEVERAGE. If I forward a link to my followers, and that gets retweeted within Twitter, plus of course heads out into the world on facebook statuses, blog posts and twitter widgets, you can see how a message that resonates with people can be seen by thousands and thousands, within minutes. That's a game-changer.
Of course, another myth of Twitter, is that posts are limited to 140 characters. Technically that is true, but nearly every Tweet that I see "ReTweeted" (a message that has been resent from one persons network to another's), are the ones which have hyperlinks to blog posts, videos, newspaper articles, etc. Again, reinforcing what I would suggest is becoming a distribution network that can't be ignored.
Here are some examples of how Twitter extends beyond it's regular platform, and into the mainstream. One is from the Edmonton Journal's website, with a widget that tracks discussion on the Alberta Legislature, the other is from the website of the 2010 ASAE Tech Conference (a trade show I will be attending in a month). These are just examples, and there are thousands of these around the internet, and demonstrate the "twitter eco-system".
Of course these are both examples of how Twitter can be a very powerful NICHE tool, and how the use of #Hashtags to sort information and tweets is a very powerful way to feel real-time pulse of an issue. The fact that Twitter can measure the thought pulse of the WHOLE WORLD or YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD at the same time is frankly mind-boggling.
