Twitter is getting more mainstream, that’s a fact. With hundreds of celebrities, politicians and tv hosts promoting the service, it’s only a matter of months till your most non-web-savy friends use it. While you’re now still surprised to hear somebody mentioning Twitter in a random bar, it will become as normal as talking about emails.
With the first thousands realizing this, a new trend seems to appear: the need to create a community feeling. It will be a short hype, as people will soon realize the service is too big for it already, but for now it’s fun.
The most salient example is #myfirstjob. Thousands of Twitter users share the experiences of their first job. The stream of stories in Twitter search is fascinating to read and gives you some sort of community feeling. We, Twitter users, can share this with folks all over the world.
Maybe one or two similar initiatives will pop up, but I’m pretty sure these are the last community-like experiences you’ll have on Twitter. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Actually, I disagree.
I think more and more communities of interest will flourish and grow within the twitter global community, and I am pretty certain that being able to create your own groups or information filters around such community aspects is going to be part of what twitter evolves into in the future.
To take an example – look at what’s happening with @twestival (See http://twestival.com)- groups of twitter users in many cities are getting together globally (but locally) to help a good cause on February 12th.
Can I ask a question?
Whats your #nextjob ?
;-)
haha great angle on this story, thanks!
A look on Tweetag about #myfirstjob ( http://tweetag.com/myfirstjob ) gives:
Restaurant, baby sitting, grocery, shopping, good, … as most related topics.
Good to browse through this community! :-)
congratulations on the way the meme developed!
Great post. I actually started the #myfirstjob on Twitter ( More deets on that here: http://carrotblog.com/myfirstjob-a-meme-a-memory) and didn’t even take into consideration how this added to the community element of Twitter. For my view I saw it as an interesting way to collect information from a valuable audience. It’s great to see how things can be seen across the community differently and used in different ways.
I think twitter is really cool and I like it better than other social networking sites.I think whether or not it will feel like a community depends on what the users will do to make it one ,regardless of how many users there are.Twitter will simply have to be more vigilant as to what they choose to allow and what not to on their site.
There are certainly new communities within Twitter appearing, but I think they represent just small groups. It’s not like thousands of people are working on Twestival – (which is a great initiative by the way)