What are you doing?

Traducción al inglés del artículo publicado en Revista Debate.

The before and after Twitter in Internet
What are you doing?

Although it’s just three years old it’s been able to talk since birth on the 21st of March 2006. Everything that it says is announced in short phrases but without taking a breath from talking every second. Sometimes you can understand it, or else, quite simply at times nobody is listening – but it continues trying to capture your attention.

This creature is called Twitter, the largest free micro blogging service that allows users to send micro entries or tweets (messages of up to 140 characters) that can be read by one’s followers and that has marked a before and after in the history of Internet. The creation of Jack Dorsey, a 35 year old entrepreneur, is a mixture between a blog and a chat room as defined by David Pogue a columnist for The New York Times.

Twitter is today one of the fantastic four of the Web and is confronting the other giants face to face.

It has just seven million users which is not a lot compared with the number registered on Facebook which now exceeds 150 million. The reasons can perhaps be found not just in the time to maturity of both services but rather in their functionalities.

Facebook invites you to search for your friends, make new ones and to entertain yourself playing games and sharing photos of your weekend with friends among other things. It’s a tool designed to enter into contact with a social world that accompanies us in our real lives off screen. Meanwhile Twitter was not born as a direct competitor of the “traditional” social networks and is more precise.

What are you doing? This is the fundamental question that motivates users to tell one another what they are doing every second. That’s why being on and being read on Twitter (if not, why?) means three things: being dedicated, considering that we have something important to say, and being in the mood to socialize about it with more people than in one’s personal social context.
But being massive, although it may seem paradoxical to describe as non-massive a service used by more than eight million people, is not everything. Over and above its growing but reduced popularity Twitter is now worrying Facebook that only recently renovated its design to appear more like this service. This concern has been born from the time consumed by users in one tool or another and from the competition that converts all websites in direct competitors of one another, even though their metier is completely different. This is the battle for time of permanence on a website.

Facebook, noting that many of their users have started to use Twitter for a function that their platform has contemplated but never strongly promoted has changed their design. Now, one of the biggest social networks in the world invites one to respond to the question “What are you thinking?” Just a little semantic nuance so as not to be too obvious.

But Twitter is not just providing battle on the social networks front.

Many users are approaching as passive members of the tool, to listen in and to find out what other people are doing, not only the rich and famous but those with a more interesting life, politicians or clubs or even to find out what people are saying about those new running shoes with the three stripes that they were thinking about buying. And from the inclusion of a simple search button inside the tool Twitter has now become a powerful new search engine. To find out whatever we wish we now have a service which is more specific and direct than even Google. So we might also say Twitter versus Google.

More than 650,000 people follow minute by minute the presidential life of Obama, almost the same number that is attentive to the comings and goings of Britney Spears or the anecdotes of the NBA basketball star Shaquille O’Neill. Ghost writers, people that write in the name of others tweet in their name. Except of course in the case of the Shaq, “its just 140 characters. If you need a ghost writer for that I feel sorry for you” argues the giant.
But everything is not pure optimism.

There is a risk that Twitter becomes a media channel with an empty audience, consuming and following so many tweeters one can easily miss out on the main announcements of each and every one of them. A common practice at the moment of capturing more and more followers is to follow others. As a grateful response we find that many of those that we follow decide to follow us in turn. It is considered good protocol. For example, if you decided to follow 1,500 people you would literally need to dedicate the entire day to Twitter in order not to miss out on everything they write about. Here is the real danger, that we create a media channel with thousands of readers that in reality don’t read us.

Twitter is the most important launch in Internet in recent years based on its repercussion and fame and has only 27 employees, something not unusual in these times of the second industrial revolution that has replaced man with software.

Neither is it a contradiction in this world in which we have become accustomed that Twitter is not yet a viable business.

Over and above the global crisis that is hammering the stock quotations of Internet companies, their investors have stated that they are not concerned about when Twitter will start making money and have even rejected a buyout offer from Facebook valued at $500 million.