Twime say Twitter will Twange the World

Yes, Time magazine has put Twitter on the front cover and got Steven Johnson to write an article on how Twitter will change the world as we know it.

Now I must say here and now that I heard Steven Johnson talk about the future of news/magazines etc at SXSW and he made far more sense than any other "Future of Print Media" session I've ever been to. But I was also at the SXSW #kebab UnConference where Twitter was lampooned as saving us from Earthquakes, the Great Recession and the Nazi Party etc etc (ie there was a certain feeling in the room that its impact was a tad overblown..... )

Now to be fair, Steven is making a good point when he says that:

Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

Its interesting to think about why - A simple 140 characters Unified Comms platform, with a simple UI system, an asymmetric pub/sub architecture, and an open API, have ensured Darwinian development into all sorts of niches that no-on imagined. And as we noted at the time, about Dec 2007 users stopped talking about lunch and started contributing interesting stuff, and that behaviour radically transformed the service's utility from vacuous gossip to useful news filter. And the system's ubiquity has seen it used as a TV backpath, a machine2machine comms system and crowdsource search engine......

But something about putting it all on the cover of Time makes one want to take the p*ss just a bit. And it wasn't just us, there's been a joke going around the 'Net today:

Just heard that YouTube, Twitter & Facebook are to merge. New name will be YouTwitFace. (from Conan O"Brien)