Peter Hall has a funny but largely true post regarding the life cycle of a new Twitter user. There has been a flurry of news activity about Twitter with Ashton Kutcher pwn’ing CNN on who can reach 1 million followers first. Twitter has officially become mainstream. Oprah Winfrey now has 280,000 followers. I would imagine a good number of them are first time users.

I, for one, don’t feel a compelling need to use Twitter but it already has gone in some interesting directions, such as providing real time data on unfolding events (Mumbai Attacks for example) Although, it is debatable how much relevant information was being micro-blogged, see Alexander Wolfe’s article. His opening line is poignant, “Never before has a crisis unleashed so much raw data — and so little interpretation.” For many, twitter is just one more distracting information feed in a sea of social media platforms; its value debatable. Fortunately all this raw data with little interpretation creates opportunities. A former colleague of mine, Demian Crumb, is doing some interesting stuff with data collection with Twitter. You can follow his efforts on Twitter, fittingly enough. 

Dan Hall