Image via CrunchBase

David Weinberger just wrote a blog post that I think does sum up well why twitter is such a big success from a technological view. I’d like to add my thoughts to this and show my reasons why Twitter is that big and why it “won’t go away when the hype is over”.

First Weinberger writes about people, who think Twitter is not a big thing because you are not interested in knowing when somebodies cat just rolled over. Either these people are right and twitter is pure nonsense (this assumes that twitter users are stupid) or these people are wrong - mostly because they don’t know what they’re talking about. It doesn’t need rocket science to know the answer. Twitter has value, otherwise not everybody would be using it.

Secondly, Twitter is very simple. This makes it get adopted by the people very fast. Usability is the most important factor in technology adoption - and signing up for twitter is easier than creating an average e-mail-account. Then sending messages is easy, shouting out your thoughts to the world too. These simple 140-character-messages and the twitter API amke a lot of software possible, that builds upon that. “RT” means re-tweet, hashtags define the topic of a tweet. Twitter-clients were born, 200+ websites rely completely on twitter doing its work. Twitter gets built in in blogs, Facebook, online-magazines and everywhere else.

Image via Wikipedia

3rd, Twitter fulfills a lot of needs. Its a all-in-one-device. Some people talk about their cat rolling over, but most use it to share interesting websites or to communicate to other twttier-users in an SMS-style (again, no big learning-curve as everybody knows how SMS are used). Some only use it to get these informations. Some use it for advertisement (amazon for example) or SEO-like to attract readers. It also directly competes with Digg, as people built layers of software that count the re-tweets of URLs - which defines their importance.

4th, its social. The web is primarily used by “ordinary people” for social interactions. As you can connect to your friends, easily set up a profile that satisfies the human need to represent itself (or “to put yourself in a box” as I like to see it with most online profiles that mostly tell people what you are not opposed to what you are - malicious sidenote over), all of that what many people seek in the internet are found in this one place. I even referred to David Weinberger by linking to his twitter profile - as you can get all infos you need about him on that page or on his homepage that you can find in his Twitter-profile. Maybe Twitter will be the centralized info page about yourself someday. Or is it already this way? Damn, I need to rework my crappy profile page!

Don’t also forget that you can easily connect to people that you would never know how to connect them if they weren’t on twitter. Companies can give support for their products with a twitter account - or gather feedback. This direct communication to the people you want to address is an important social factor.

5th, Twitter has dominance. As all social websites, the ones where your friends are attract you, or vice-versa. Therefore, the Twitter-clones have lost the microblogging-war (as I would like to call it), as most users are on Twitter. This is the same with all those social websites that keep dying - why would I want to join a new social website, if Facebook already does far more than the new one? Even if it has a nice feature, Facebook is extensible, so that feature could be added to Facebook pretty easily.

After all, Twitter has the potential to just replace SMS and services like Digg. It already is dominant in terms of microblogging. Twitter will also find a financial model to make them last - they generate enough traffic to be able to raise more than enough money with ads, but they decided they don’t need to do that.

A last mention in terms of Twitter-usability: Last week I talked about the_gman being a Twitter-spammer because he uses a lot of short answers that don’t help anyone else following his twitter stream. There was a misunderstanding that a lot of people showed me in their comments. What I learned is that you can set an option in your twitter-settings that let you only see the tweets with @username in them if you follow the other person (in this case @username). Twitter SHOULD set this in the beginning. If you are getting a lot of these @replies, get to http://twitter.com/account/notifications and set the @Replies as you want them.

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Very small introduction to twitter: Twitter is a broadcast service, and everyone who follows you can read your updates. You follow people who you think twitter about interesting stuff, whose tweets amuse you or who post interesting links. If you use an @username, you are referring to someone on twitter, but still everyone can read this update. Look at the following problematic screenshot from @the_gman, this is also a nice example how to design a twitter ppearance… but thats not the point here:

Here you can see a successful twitterer (in terms of followers) broadcast private messages all the day. This makes him have an incredible number of updates, but it seems that he didn’t understand the @username-command.

Again, the @username is only to be used if you want to refer to somebody, but only if you want to world to read that update too. If you tweet “Nice blogpost by @ithoughts_de, go and read it everyone http://tinyurl/somechars”, you tell the world about my nice blogpost and that you recommend it. If you tweet “@AustinPrime You’re welcome”, you tell all of your 14,150 followers … guess what? Nothing! You spam their timeline! Listen @the_gman and all other spammers out there: I’m following you because you sometimes have interesting stuff to say or you tweet interesting links. But I’m not following you to read your public conversations, and I guess no one does that.

Image via Wikipedia

Twitter has a feature thats specific for you. This is called direct messages. You can tweet “d AustinPrime You’re welcome”, and AustinPrime will read your answer and maybe reply. This is a email or IM-like feature, and it should be used MUCH MORE to make twitter useful. In fact @guykawasaki used to twitter his direct messages via @username for a week or so and I thought about unfollowing him for cluttering my timeline.

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We are living in exponential times. Science works much faster than ever. New technology that helps us managing our life in a more comfortable and quicker way gets developed every day. The world population cooperates over the internet. People are confronted with more and more information every day. Social bookmaring services and twitter gives us 1000 interesting links to watch every day. This might either mean information overload or adaption of the brain. Will we cope this stream of information and be hyperintelligent or will we just waste our time watching useless information making us inproductive?

Just in case you didn’t see this video before, take the 5 minutes of time and watch it. Its really impressive.

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

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Image via Wikipedia

Listening to technology-podcasts on the german Handelsblatt.com-website, I heard about Zemanta. It is a service that uses a firefox-plugin to read out your blogged text and parsing it for “words they know”. They present you links, tags and images to embed in your blog post, showing you links to wikipedia-articles and pictures fitting the content. Just after finishing this sentence, the sidebar that gets embedded in my webbackend of wordpress refreshes. Whoa! I got 5 links for the first sentence and I just included them all. I also included a pic you see floating right.

This is what many people think the semantic web or Web 3.0 to be. And in a way, it is. The use of Web 3.0 (the term in my understanding encapsulates user-generated-content as in Web 2.0 and the semantic web) in blogging seems logical to me as blogging the one of the most public displays of Web 2.0. This firefox-plugin makes it much easier to generate interesting articles and IF it doesn’t break my blog frontend, I’ll definitely use it in every post from here on. But back to the functions:

Image by pshab via Flickr

You can press an update-button and your content gets scanned again. New pictures appear and new links can be included. Just realized that most links are Wikipedia ones, but some (like the firefox-plugin-link or the Zemanta-link at the top) are also directed at other “well-known” resources. You can search for a term you put into a searchbar and get links, content and new pics. I tried “semantic web” for example. You can drag-and-drop pictures into the content-pane, and it gets easily included.

We’re standing on the edge of Web 3.0. I don’t think that this here is all that Web 3.0 is about, but I think its a great application that can be called “Web 3.0″-ly. If you would like to use this ff-plugin too, just go to their website and install it. You’ll have to agree to their TOS, that basically says “don’t change anything our plugin includes” and “we need access to the text you write” and “you are in charge for your content and all content you get from us as we show you the license”. So now I hope this post doesn’t get destroyed by some bad constructed CSS on my side. Fire and forget - or do you have any comments, iThoughts or fears about this plugin? You may also comment in german.

Image via Wikipedia

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Today I took a look into the AppStore and downloaded two new free Apps: HeavyMach Lite & TouchPhysics Lite, then I upgraded seven other AppStore apps. Since then I got the word “special” on top of my background-wallpaper, just beneath the time. Here’s a screenshot (that you can make with hold the home-button, then also tap the power-button; you’ll find the screenshot on your camera-roll):

I googled but only found this clueless (german) article and some even more clueless forum-posts: Magerquark-Blog. Looks like a lot of people are getting this error, and it isn’t connected to the jailbreak as many people with original hard- and software without modifications get it too. Most report the error is gone after powering off the iPhone and restarting it. I tried that too, and I can affirm that it works.

Many people also asked T-Online and Apple about the “special” behaviour, but as noone could give an answer, it could also mean that a virus, spy- or malware is infecting iPhones and iPods. If you have any aditional information, please comment.

You may also comment this article in german. If you wanna share this article, I would appreciate if you tweeted it.