{"id":2372,"date":"2008-04-28T15:32:44","date_gmt":"2008-04-28T20:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=2372"},"modified":"2008-04-28T15:32:44","modified_gmt":"2008-04-28T20:32:44","slug":"twitter-more-mainstream-than-it-looks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/04\/28\/twitter-more-mainstream-than-it-looks\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter: more mainstream than it looks"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend Kara Swisher has a post up about Twitter, in which she talks about an informal poll she took<\/a> of some friends at a wedding, and how none of them had ever heard of Twitter. Everyone had heard of Facebook, however, and about half of them had an account. Is that surprising<\/a>? Not really. I’ve done similar polls of my non-geek friends (yes, I have some), and virtually no one had any idea what I was talking about. But when I described it as being like the Facebook status update crossed with MSN Messenger, most of them totally got it.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t that long ago that having a Facebook account was unusual for someone not in university. I can still remember telling people that I had one, and getting nothing but blank stares — and now most of those people have an account, or have at least heard of it. I’m also old enough to remember when a chat application called ICQ<\/a> came along in 1997, and I quickly became a heavy user, along with some of my close friends. No one else had any idea what we were talking about then either. But by 2000, Microsoft had launched Messenger<\/a>, and within a couple of years it had hundreds of millions of accounts.<\/p>\n

Is the potential market for a “group chat” application like Twitter as broad as the market for instant messaging apps? Probably not — especially with a 140-character limit, which some people might enjoy as a kind of haiku-style restriction<\/a>, but some would likely see as ridiculous (is there a shortage of electrons?). And it may not be as large as the market for Facebook either. But I don’t think the concept of Twitter is quite as foreign as many people make it out to be — and certainly no more foreign than the idea of “instant messaging” was not all that long ago. And as MG Siegler notes, there are some pretty cool apps<\/a> being built on top of it.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b><\/p>\n

Mike Arrington has some Twitter stats<\/a> from a source inside the company.<\/p>\n

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My friend Kara Swisher has a post up about Twitter, in which she talks about an informal poll she took of some friends at a wedding, and how none of them had ever heard of Twitter. Everyone had heard of Facebook, however, and about half of them had an account. Is that surprising? Not really. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Twitter: more mainstream than it looks”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}