How Toby Young got Twitter

Sometime earlier this year in the immediate Twitter frenzy that followed Stephen Fry's live-tweeting from a broken lift, Toby Young (he of "How To Lose Friends and Alienate People" infamy) joined Twitter.

And he really annoyed me.

In his Spectator column he loudly berated Twitter, bemoaning the fact that being part of Twitter felt like a dull party where everyone talks loudly but no-one talks to you. I sent him a tweet that day in which I tried to point that he just hadn't started using the "@" sign in his tweets. Once you understand the etiquette of "@" then it suddenly becomes quite easy to join the conversation. I heard nothing back, which surprised me, most people when they recieve a direct tweet usually respond (unless of course you're trying to tweet with Ashton Kutcher or Oprah Winfrey!)

Toby seemed to be in the same Twitter-trap as a lot of journalists who on one hand deride Twitter as being the ultimate in boring self-promotion, but on the other hand write weekly columns talking about the minute details and daily in's and out's of their lives. It always stuck me as fairly hypocritical.

Which was why I enjoyed Toby's latest Spectator piece : "I would like to take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly to Twitter. Like many of my colleagues, I unfairly characterised it as a vacuous expression of our narcissistic age. In fact, it turns out to be the most effective tool for advancing freedom and democracy since the invention of the internet." It's a lovely piece of writing, very funny, a great example of volte-face and well worth reading and sharing with all those Twitter-deriders. And I have to say that I totally agree with him!

I spoke at a Unilever PR conference last week that Simon Clift was heading up. I was talking about Social Media and brands. One of the folks attending, Babs Rangaiah asked me for my views on Twitter. He wanted to know if I thought that Twitter was here to stay and would people still be using it next year or the year after. The quick and honest answer is "I have no idea". The longer and honest answer is that whether  or not Twitter remains as the active micro-blogging platform of choice is almost an irrelevance, what is more important are the behaviours that it has helped to foster. Twitter in and of itself is simple a platform of communications, I prefer to look at what Twitter users that have developed themselves such as the use of "@" replies which was started by users not by the founders, the use of hashtags "#" and essential applications like TweetDeck, Twitterfall and TwitPic.

Twitter is conversation, a smart Search application, negates my need to visit Netvibes and check RSS feeds  and Twitter is a means of bringing events happening far away from me physically close at hand (be that #iranelection or #MasterChef) In essence Twitter is what you want it to be. It is becoming as important to me as Google.

Have a read of Toby's article. I'd love to know if you agree.

Comments

[Account Deleted]

This passage from Young's piece I think underlines the power of Twitter:

"Because users of the service can tweet from a wide range of platforms — web browsers, mobile phones, etc — it is difficult to shut down. If an Iran-based web server is closed, users simply re-route their messages via another server."

I think people at first saw it as just another website; somewhere you go to read stuff other people have written.

Hence the whole supposition that twitter was only for the vain... "anyway, enough about me, what do YOU think of me..."

The things that people have used it for over the last few months have shown it's clearly much greater.

Think of Twitter as a box of Lego bricks. An assortment of millions of different 'blocks' which people can use to construct the most wonderful and useful services, for everything from the broadest to narrowest purposes.

I vaguely remember someone likening Facebook to being 'the new telephone' in recent weeks... but I actually think that microblogging (be it Twitter, Facebook Status etc etc) is the next 'telephonic' infrastructure.

The question is though, how do you make money from infrastructure that people have already had for free?

If the US Govt. are keen enough to keep Twitter open for the Iranian elections, and are keen enough for banks not to fail as it would damage society, would they be willing to support a microblogging infrastructure if it turned out that Twitter wasn't 'monetisable'?