In 2005-06 a phenomenon called Orkut hit India.People were totally hooked on to it.Even i made a profile on it in 2006,after that a social networking revolution came to india.

In US Europe etc  this had already started 2 3 years back.MySpace,Facebook etc were already super popular.

India also caught on well with all these trends.Orkut become a passe soon Facebook took over for Personal and social networks.LinkedIn for professional and MySpace just for timepass.( am talking India)

Then suddenly new words started to make some noise twitter,tweets and this noise took the world by surprise and shook it.They intoduced the concept of microblogging  and SMS type social networking.

Twitter has changed a lot of things.When i first heard about it and saw it,i thought,”one more in the crowd but interesting name !”

But then this word kept on creeping on the Internet,magazines.When i was at HP for my summer internship,i read about it on company’s website.I thought boy,this is serious stuff.

I made my profile and started to TWEET.

Sites like MySpace,Orkut and facebook had already changed the way the world communicated(at least a lot did),but twitter has changed world works.

• Twitter has made marketers rethink the way they market.You can follow(twitter term) any company and get their tweets on your twitter profile.(On twitter you can find more companies than users.All have their twitter accounts and send tweets to their followers.The new age marketing.)
• New product launch,new ad,relaunch,any news about company,results anything,they send you tweets instantly the thing happens.Viral marketing has a whole new dimension and medium to grow.
• Bloggers like me use Twitter to announce the new posts instantly as the post is published.(you can follow me here)
• Celebrities use tweets to keep the fan following.
• Friends use it just to keep in touch
• People can share things,links,news.
• It helps you say things qucikly and simply.
• Ministers use it to keep in touch with people.Shashi Tharoor,MP, twitters regularly.Even Obama does.I dont know  about Osama.
• All news networks like CNN,BBC have their tweets going on.People can follow them for instant news.

Many of the things above are also possible on Facebook and are done on too but then why twitter is what it is?

Nobody knows why twitter has become so successful.Some say lucky,some say chance,Some say it was good and others say who cares why ?

But when you see the data you think why is this SMS type site 25th ranked site in the world with 26 M monthly users(just in the US).In Social networking ranks its 3rd after Facebook and MySpace.You can have more info on Twitter data and demographics here.

So Why Twitter is so successful ?

The reasons i gathered from different websites are listed below.

1. It’s an extremely easy concept to pick up for anyone without any training whatsoever
2. It’s highly usable through all types of web enabled devices
3. It leverages existing, globally adopted content generation practices such as text messaging which is already incredibly popular
4. It brings a novelty factor and a new arena within which marketeers and tech enthusiast can experiment in and inevitably end up viral marketing it due to their initial enthusiasm about the tool
5. Most users today find blogging or web authoring cumbersome, but will happily Twitter away as it’s easy and quick
6. Most users don’t posses serious writing skills and Twitter does not require serious writing skills
7. Users don’t have time to write and read anymore and Twitter messages are well within the threshold of average user’s attention span
8. Internet suffers from a massive problem of information overload and Twitter seems to offer a way out of it to some extent
9. It is still virtually impossible to do more serious work (blogging and authoring) on modern portable devices today, even Net Books. The most that can really be done is an odd Twitter message here and there, so most users then spend time doing what they can with the tools that are available to them today
10. Internet just wasn’t designed for big, lengthy, hard to read articles and books, so users are much more likely to read tweets and stick to reading them over longer period of time
11. It’s a fairly immediate way of communicating and can be very personal, which beats most other forms of communication
12. Users like trivia and nonsense as we live in the world of entertainment today and Twitter offers much light information, non-stop at every one’s easy disposal
13. The curiosity and celebrity backing which has surrounded Twitter drives users towards experimenting with it and trying to work out what the hype is really all about.

Oops ! A Tweet is just 140 characters long and my post about it is about 740 words long ! oops again!

Leaving with an interesting cartoon

Comments Please !

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