Emerging Technologies Consulting

Last week, the Internet was abuzz with the fact that Oprah was going to starting using Twitter.  Techies were pissed that such a mainstream user was invading their space, bringing with her thousands of “soccer moms” who were going to muck it up for everyone.  I was a bit upset with the way the story was getting spun in the technology press and blog sites, mostly that moms were somehow bad for Twitter or too stupid to use it “correctly.”

In some cases, being too popular can be a bad thing.  When MySpace and Facebook became extremely popular and everyone, inculding your weird Uncle Bob, joined up, many found that to be a problem.  I have 243 friends on Facebook, mostly because I just friend anyone who friends me.  And that’s too many for me to manage and so I don’t really use Facebook.  I could cull my friends, but that takes time I don’t have.  Blogs also went mainstream a few years ago, with many bloggers grouping together and forming conglomerates, like The Huffington Post, and every news outlet now has blogs on their site, some of which are quite good, but some . . . well.  And that changed the blog world.  It was harder to get noticed when traffic was going to the big commercial sites.  Some individual bloggers benefitted for sure, getting contracts to blog for big media sites.  But most others, myself included, remained relatively secluded and even less likely to gain a large audience. But, I wasn’t trying to make money off my blog.  I use it much the same way I use Twitter, to express my ideas and share them with a random collection of people who share my interests.  It seems to me that having more people on Twitter might be a good thing.  One could find many more people to Tweet, perhaps allowing you to find a larger market or a larger audience.  No one’s making anyone follow all of Oprah’s followers, and it’s likely that many of those people won’t keep up their Twittering if they don’t find it useful.  And many will also simply follow Oprah and not tweet at all.  Just like with blogs, there are many more readers of tweets than there are writers even if it is slightly less work.  Most people prefer to be watchers rather than participants.

From my perspective as an educator, when a tool goes mainstream, that’s good for me.  It’s easier to talk about tools, both as actual tools that can be used in teaching and learning, and as metaphors–making a classroom more like the blogosphere or the twitterverse–when more people know about them.  Non-technical people start to pay attention when their local news anchors encourage them to follow them on Twitter.  Some things that still haven’t gone mainstream–wikis and social bookmarking–and they are therefore difficult to get people to appreciate their usefulness.  As an early adopter, I understand the feeling of some techies of not feeling like they had the edge on the world by being Twitter users, but I think we need to learn to embrace the mainstream and their use of Web 2.0.  It may, in fact, make Web 2.0 more useful for us.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast? (nytimes.com)
• Twitter’s big day today? Here comes Oprah (news.cnet.com)
• How Many New Twitter Users Post-Oprah? A Lot. Maybe Over A Million. (techcrunch.com)