The Future Of Twitter

Of the many social networking platforms to battle for supremacy in the 21st century, one unlikely contender has become dominant using a very unconventional strategy. That service is Twitter, and it wins through ultimate simplicity. In fact, Twitter is actually nothing more than a stripped-down IRC: it's a text-only chat service without 90% of IRC's features and with an imposed limit of 140 characters.

Yet Twitter has become the lingua franca of text messaging utilities, being the hive to which celebrities, politicians, and rock stars flock to, as well as people from every walk of life. Even Richard Stallman - founder of the Free Software Foundation and an avid opponent of proprietary platforms - broke down and got a Twitter account. It's that essential!

So what lies in the future for Twitter? There is only one of two things that can happen: Either Twitter will add new features and expand as its capabilities match the hardware it runs on, or it will become obsolete when new, competing platforms with features replace it. Witness the previous success of previous "chat" and instant-messaging platforms such as ICQ, AOL, and Yahoo. Users will eventually seek out more expanded capability that just 140 text characters, especially when they would rather trade a video or image than type out text.

We see another example in the recent introduction of Apple's Siri, a voice-based search assistant. Google's Eric Schmidt has recently said that Siri could supplant Google as the dominant search engine. Google, after enjoying 12 years of almost unchallenged success, is now afraid of becoming obsolete, something nobody thought could happen. If Google can be phased out, so can Twitter.

Twitter rose at the right time as people finally came off phone tariffs that cost the earth, and began to tweet as much as they wished. Twitter was the perfect vehicle for people to get their various messages out to the world, an almost throw-away system that people could chatter to the world with. This perfect timing may have its sell by date, as phone manufacturers cut out the middle man. Twitter also rose due to significant zeitgeist, from popular celebrities and prominent famous persons. As the shine comes off this rise, Twitter will need to adapt to the changing world as all of its competitors are able to do, if it is to survive and not go down in history as a flash in the pan.

By: Mark J Gregory

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Mark Gregory is writing on behalf of Marketing By Web; an online marketing company specialising in ppc advertising management and ppc advertising company