The Beginning of the End of the Beginning
Posted by: John Mark Seck in Social Media, Inspiration, Ideas on Jun 12, 2009
It seems the dam that is the flow of information has completely burst and the great global conversation is raging through the neurons of all of us who choose to jack in.
I attended another social media forum yesterday (a good one by the way Zone5ive ) and decided it was time to take another look at Twitter. I looked at it a bit over a year ago and it didn't grab me but now, it seems to be a very different thing. The information seems more relevent and the tweets more thoughtful. Of course, it's me finally being ready for it rather than the other way round.
After spending a long day thinking about it and playing with Twitter (Tweetdeck is a must), I can't help but think Twitter is a really serious problem for the News business. Watching the cloud evolving on Twitscoop makes me think there has probably never been anything that provides a greater sense of the collective conscious than this. Like most things new media, it will probably not kill the traditional media equivalent (one of the first feeds I thought I'd follow was New York Times) but it likely already has, shifted the balance and probably forever.
This evening, the cloud shifted from an emphasis on the Stanley Cup Playoffs, to Pittsburgh, to a hydrogen leak on Endeavor, to the Facebook Countdown. None of this was earth shattering (No offence to the Penguins) except maybe for the fact that over 1,000,000 people signed up for FB user names in the first hour. But it did all feel more immediate and tangible than almost any news experience I've had in the past.
The pace of change is ferocious, and it's hard to decide which Wave to catch, but for any of you who have been holding off on Twitter, it's time to jump in!
N.B. June 13, 2009 As a quick follow up to this post, Twitter lit up tonight with news from Iran and the election protests. Western media, primarily CNN ( #CNNfail ) seemed to be missing the story completely but #IranElection was keeping pace with every development. http://ow.ly/dZ8m Truly amazing to see history unfold, around the globe, in real-time.
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