Sep 4, 2009
The many ways in which the experience of Twitter’s development and growing popularity is very much like the experience of early blogging
The reminder a couple of weeks ago that pioneering blog publishing engine Blogger was launched ten years ago got me thinking.
I’ve been blogging for nearly ten years now - since it began with a W - and being involved with something from the beginning, plus passionate (and sometimes despondent) about its potential and usage in the years since means I’ve had a lot of time to watch and think about how it has matured and been used. There are certain things which we can now look back on and consider milestones in the development and maturing of blogging - like how the media responded to it, how people embraced and used it and how it penetrated mainstream web usage over time.
Likewise, Twitter.
Like blogging (which I started doing in January 2000, and used Blogger to publish my blog from April of that year), I’ve been using Twitter since relatively early on - my earliest update via Twitter was in November 2005. I’d link to it, but
a) it’s in my private/personal account (@megp) and
b) all my archived tweets (pre July 31 2009) have disappeared, as experienced by many others in this thread on the Twitter help forum.
It’s actually that help forum - and the appalling petulant and rude manner in which some users are addressing Twitter staff - which got me thinking more specifically about how, in so many ways, the timeline of the Twitter story mirrors that of Blogger and early blogging. Both have seen similar patterns of early usage and behaviour and adoption by certain functional and social groups, and both have learnt - the hard way, sometimes - about technical and social scaling issues as well as being a playground for emergent behaviours and activities, and all the fun and challenge that comes with that.
This isn’t an attempt to demonstrate that startups and new technologies are subject to many of the same pressures and reception issues - that’s been clearly documented and brilliantly expressed in Gartner’s Hype Curve. Rather, I wanted to explore some of the striking similarities in specific situations, movements and experiences in the early days of both micropublishing and blogging, from the perspective of an early settler and long-term resident of both of these strange and wonderful new(ish) countries.
So here’s something I’ve been working on for a little while: it’s a very approximate timeline of the activities, patterns, behaviours and reactions experienced by both Twitter (/micropublishing) and Blogger (/early blogging) during their first few years.
I’m sure we could put dates to most of these “decisive moments” for both Twitter and blogging, given the time and resources to do so.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear your comments and ideas about other similarities you may have spotted.
(86, by the way, in Blogger’s case at least was “Get bought by major web player”)
[...] The many ways in which the experience of Twitter’s development and growing popularity is very much… [...]
Spot on and I’m sure you’ve caught the main similarities. I love the move from 17 - “Media portrays users as internet weirdos with no lives” through to 42 Media get interested because of growth of celebrity users and to 64 “Adopted by mainstream media as part of normal publishing or journalism work”.
When are we going to get our first Twitter book (Twook) or TV series from a series of Tweet though?
[...] The many ways in which the experience of Twitter’s development and growing popularity is very much… (tags: blogosphere Twitter bloghistory) [...]
Nice clarifying timeline & Gartner’s Hype Curve! When I think and rethink about it I’m not sure where to put Twitter right now in the Gartner’s hype curve. Is Twitter at the point of ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ (that’s how I feel about it right now) or already passed the point ‘Slope of Enlightenment’? Should we not devide the Twitter users into a couple of groups? My assumption is that each groups rounds the timeline with a different speed and at a different time. The group ‘early adapters’ already rounded this timeline a few times. They had their own early adapters, media, experts, celebrities etc.
The groups I see: early adapters, new users and their friends, small media, mainstraim media, celebrities, experts, people you never expected, everyone (= it became a killer application = we can’t be a social human being without it).