Seeing Through the Twitter Clouds

Ten million people have joined.  I was officially number 9,639,352.  Looking back, I am amazed both at the progression of connections made and the topics discussed.  There is a proliferation of tools out there for reviewing your history on Twitter, but two that have been getting a lot of discussion lately are Tweetcloud and Twitterholic.  Here is my personal tweetcloud - note that tweeting during the Forrester Marketing Forum last week skewed the results a bit.  Thanks to Geoff Livingston for suggesting to generate my own cloud.  What does yours tell you?

I also took a few minutes to generate my statistics at Twitterholic.  Over the past several months I've seen about 10-15 new followers a week.  It's exciting but is it really sustainable?  I see that Twitter has moved beyond the "early adopter" phase (since clearly I am not one), but it has a long way to go before fully being accepted mainstream as another social media tool.  During this early phase where there are more people not using Twitter than using, there is a lot of excitement about new concepts and experiments.  Everything from companies bringing their customer service onto Twitter (H&R Block, Comcast, Dell, Southwest to name a few) to breaking news sources, well known bloggers and more.  But once everyone is on Twitter - will it just be a pile of noise that is unmanageable?  Rumors of grouping functionality will help, otherwise users will have to resort to smaller numbers of connections. 

What do you see for the future of Twitter?

edit: The 10 million number is according to Twitterholic.com.  @hci asked over twitter, and she was #12,628,652 according to that site.  She also properly suggests Twitterholic is measuring number of accounts, not users.  Thanks!

Comments

[Beth Kanter]

Really good question. Don't you think someone will develop a version that can actually set up private groups or work groups? Can it scale?

[Adam Cohen]

Hi Beth - I hope that twitter will make a leap into an enterprise tool. In order to do that it has to be able to filter or make connections more private in some way. I for one would love for everyone in my company to be on twitter, but to do that we'd have to have a private group to work in and our tweets could not (and should not) be in the public timeline.

Remember the scene in Bruce Almighty when he is responding to prayers via computer? No time to read it all, it just becomes a blur. I'm concerned twitter will become a pool of noise for most users unless there are options to help people manage their connections more appropriately.

[Mark Wisniewski]

Great post (which I found through Beth's blog)

As far as the question of private tweet groups, Chris Brogan had written about a service: http://grouptweet.com/

[adrian Chan]

good post adam -- i'm fascinated by this myself, and in fact found you because i'm doing some topical and conversation analysis of twitter... you might find these interesting:

http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2008/04/hashing-through-twitter-hashtags-look.html

http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2008/04/reputation-conversational-index-twitter.html