It is no secret that I love Twitter. I have to admit that besides email, Twitter is my most important communications tool, particularly for my business but not exclusively so. The more I see where social media and online communications is going, the more I realize how Twitter has transformed the landscape in both big and subtle ways.
An obvious example of Twitter’s impact is how it is quickly becoming part of our lexicon. Even mainstream media is referring to the Twitterstream, using Twitter to gauge public sentiment, and referring to people’s Twitter pages. Twitter has moved beyond being the news and is now helping to source news for many reporters.
Here are some other ways Twitter has had game-changing impact:
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Presence and availability information has been one of the key enabling technologies for web workers, providing signaling mechanisms for indicating the ability and willingness of users to communicate, whether by instant message, VoIP call, caller ID or even an email auto-responder.
Together presence and status indicators weaved through our various communication channels make teleworking and telecommuting less painless and provide useful ’social signaling’ that would ordinarily take place in office environments. It’s arguable that time & distance are no longer useful measures of the value or cost of communication, but the richness of contextual signaling available in any one medium.
Personally, I’ve found the most profound innovations in presence, latterly, to be Twitter and to a lesser extent Jaiku. Both provide important mechanisms for richly describing presence location - whether it’s location, activity or even mood…the latter perhaps signaling the solicitation of communication. In Jaiku’s case, it’s not difficult to imagine the universe of Google applications setting and utilizing presence through Jaiku.
Recently, Anthony Townsend of Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future speculated on Telepresence as a Driver for Presence. Townsend writes about the correlation between new communication technologies and long-haul travel, speculating that the arrival of HD videoconferencing and the uptick in fuel prices should be a perfect storm, but improved fidelity is often applied to mundane communication with a premium still attached to in-person meetings when closing down important decisions.
Certainly, HD sports channels are no substitute for watching your favourite team live at a stadium, though such media broadens the appeal and access to physically exclusive events. So despite living at the bleeding edges of human communication, we web workers do place a premium on ‘live’…
Read more at Telepresence as a Driver for Presence and The Future of Presence…
Microblogging service Jaiku is suddenly showing signs of life again - for the first time since its acquisition by Google back in January. After a few days offline, they returned with a blog entry and a couple of announcements: Jaiku is now running in one of Google’s data centers (though apparently the long-promised port to App Engine is not yet done), and they’ve opened up invitations. Though there’s still no open signup, any Jaiku member can invite an unlimited number of new members.
But the question has to be asked: does it matter? If Jaiku had managed to reopen with fanfare a month or two back, when Twitter was having severe uptime problems, it might have stolen the microblogging spotlight. Now, though, with Twitter humming along smoothly, it seems destined to be just another also-ran. While I won’t rule out the possibility of exciting innovations (or the traffic boost that could come from things like integration with existing Google accounts), it remains true that the leading service is the one where conversations are already taking place.
