At the “Future of Media” panel in New York, Twitter exec Jack Dorsey said he wants Twitter to be like electricity, e-mail, SMS, or phone . It’s an ambitious goal, and whether Twitter will reach such levels of ubiquity depends on whether its creators have really discovered a new communication channel. “I think Twitter’s a success for us when people stop talking about it,” said Dorsey. Given the amount of coverage Twitter receives right now, it seems almost impossible, but one day it will happen; the question is whether it’ll happen because people have forgotten about Twitter or because it really became commonplace like electricity? Right now, Twitter seems to be moving in the right direction. Instead of overcrowding the service with features, they’ve kept it very simple and let the others do the work. Dorsey seems to agree with this philosophy, claiming they haven’t focused on making money yet because they want to let developers and users shape the service first. Is it possible, however, that people at one point simply stop caring about a 140-character, one-to-many message broadcasting system? Once a communication channel is established, it’s hard to get rid of it; e-mail, for example, is far from perfect, but people are still using it. But

Twitter isn’t yet ubiquitous like e-mail, SMS, phone or electricity, because nothing really depends on it - yet. You don’t really need to use Twitter for anything; it’s fun, yes; it’s useful; but it’s not necessary , while e-mail - for example - is necessary for business communication. We’ve seen ideas about using Twitter for emergency alerts , but I’d say that Twitter’s chance of becoming really ubiquitous is to become the new SMS. Short Message Service does very little besides sending, well, short messages (and images, audio and video, if you count MMS). Twitter does so much more. You can’t search through all the SMS’ in the world to find out timely information about a topic. You don’t have countless options to view, send, and organize all your SMS’ from just about any device that can connect to the internet. With mobile platforms becoming more and more advanced, and mobile data communication getting cheaper, Twitter has a real chance of becoming the open short message service SMS will never be. If they make it, I doubt making money will be a problem for them. Reviews: Twitter Tags: microblogging , simplicity , twitter

View original here: 
Twitter Wants to Be Just Like Electricity