Oprah gains 225,000 followers in less than 13 hours. Ashton Kutcher hits 1 million followers 
before CNN. All signs point to Twitter has gone mainstream. Yet, the community isn’t happy. Twitter was the lone place where the geeks reigned supreme-think the arcade in Can’t Buy Me Love – but now all the cool kids are coming in.
Twitter in it’s short life span has been thought of and talked about in many ways:
- At first it was, “who cares what I’m doing right now”
- Then it was, “I can’t believe how many people are downtown at the Apple store right now, impromptu tweetups ROCK !”
- Then the onslaught of tools came to help the community communicate and find each other easier
- From there it went to, “I listen to as many people as possible because it’s better than Google, it’s user-authenticated search on topics that matter most to me”
- Some thought it would replace Google as the new form of search
- Replace text messaging, although it’s sort of like text messaging
- And now, it’s a popularity contest with spammers promising more followers and celebrities begging for more followers-and that’s if they are really the ones tweeting
- I should mention, it still hasn’t made money
I think that the Twitter community is big enough to host the different types of people coming in. Just like any community, it starts with one mission, then more people come and naturally there’s a cultural split and segmentation occurs. It’s a diverse crowd now, and diversity is not all that bad.
