Lee’s Daily Blog

This post is for Monday 2nd February 2009

So I’m writing this quite a bit after everyone else is thinking something similar. However, in the last couple of weeks I’ve finally come round to the thought that Twitter is finally starting to head mainstream.

Why did it happen? I think it was celebrity involvement – at least here in the UK. Obama I think helped in the States, Britney I don’t think was any use at all, but here in the UK I think we can thank Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross.

I joined twitter almost two years ago now. At that stage I think I was moving with a lot of the web enthusiasts, but quite a bit ahead of the general curve. For a year or so I didn’t really use it – couldn’t see the purpose, but I think a lot of people were in a similar situation. As more apps came out though, more businesses started using it to broadcast news, I started using it more and more. It was when I finally decided to install the desktop client Twhirl that my usage really started to take off.

That said, it has been a love / hate relationship. I use twitter in conjunction with Remember The Milk to receive reminders of various things I need to do. This was fantastic when I could receive SMS updates. Unfortunately, twitter did make the decision to stop SMS updates in the UK and although I could pay to use one of the unofficial services, I’ve gone straight for RTM’s iPod Touch app. The loss of SMS updates in the UK is one of the things I miss most about twitter (unlike the fail whales which I am so pleased are gone – I wonder how many of the new twitter users will ever experience the joy that is the fail whale on a regular basis?).

As I started using twitter more, I didn’t really have any of my friends using it. I generally used it (and still do) to post updates about my life – dull to most people, but sometimes interesting things come up. The main thing I used twitter for was receiving updates – whether it was Mac Rumours, what Leo Laporte was up to or Podcast updates.

In the last few months I had a slow move of friends towards twitter – generally the remainder of those interested in the internet who didn’t already have a presence on twitter – they then started the learning curve I went through, but slightly quicker as the role of twitter was a bit more established and defined.

However, in the last week I’ve started spotting friends I wouldn’t expect on there – they don’t keep up with Tech trends and often follow the crowd – your average mainstream person. Why have they joined? I think it’s due to The Jonathan Ross Show and the date of their first Tweet would add to this argument.

Many people on twitter already followed Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) who was a guest on the Jonathan Ross show a couple of weeks ago. Jonathan Ross has also recently started using twitter (@wossy) and the topic of Twitter came up on the show. At that point, there seemed to be an almost instant increase in UK users of twitter. I myself made a twitter comment on it and got pointed in the direction of the search page where searching for Jonathan Ross pointed towards so many people who signed up and were posting to say they’d heard about twitter on the show – and this was just a few minutes after it was mentioned.

If you have a look at the graphs of people following Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross, you can see the jump as a result of the show – assuming most of these were new users, that’s quite a few from being mentioned for only a couple of minutes on a TV show:

Stephen Fry

Jonathan Ross

Now with celebrities starting to use it in a more enthusiastic way than Britney Spears, I think we’re going to start hearing it more on the Radio, on TV and in the papers (on the odd occasion I listen to the radio, I have already heard twitter mentioned a few times in the last week and the mention of twitter on The Jonathan Ross Show made it into The Independent). With it being mentioned more and more, I think it’s going to continue to bring people to the service. I think celebrities could be giving twitter the move to main stream they wanted.

Twitter has already been in the news as being one of the first places where major news seems to break – the plane crash into the Hudson River for example. Could we be seeing this happen more and more as twitter becomes more mainstream? We’ve heard social journalism be talked about – could this be yet another break through in this area?

The major question though is – How long can Twitter survive? Hopefully the frequent fail whales are gone now, so the uptime will be a lot better, but how about earning money off the service to cover costs? It won’t surprise me to see paid options for receiving SMS updates, or charging business users to access the service – but will they be able to earn enough to keep the service running?

So although most of you are already on twitter, if not, why not head over there and give it a look. Whilst you are over there, follow me (@leesto). I think the ‘follow me’ phrase is one we’re all going to hear a lot more of in future. Twitter is one of those places in the world where you could probably find out almost anything. After all, where else would you hear about stephen fry getting stuck in a lift?