my nonlinear

We have all heard the hype.  Twitter.  Mainstream.

Is it?

Ok ok so it’s apparently ‘mainstream’. The BBC has told us, so it must be.  I think that may depend on your interpretation of mainstream.  I interpret that as used across multiple disciplines, platforms and user groups.  So mainstream Twitter, are the youth of today using your services, are the retired reading tweets on the hour every hour? Is it being used in places of work, in shops, in museums and in education?  Do the users have no geological boundary’s, it is loved by many across all countries (heavy USA dominance for users at the moment).

I’m not so sure. The articles glorifying the ‘famous’ users will certainly help, keeping in mind that many of them are the agents of these stars, and it’s used just for promotions.

I work for a large college, and I talked about Twitter in some of my courses studying technology.  From all of the students who signed up for the service (not many did) they all asked how can they use it because no one they knew was on it (i.e their friends were not using it).  They do however have friends on MySpace (130 million users), Youtube, Facebook. When Facebook clocks up its 5th year and celebrates 150 million users and Youtube hits an all time high – online clips were watched more than four billion times by over 30 million people (according to internet monitor comScore). That sounds pretty mainstream. (more…)