Time magazine has hopped onto the Twitter bandwagon, and in grand fashion -- a recent article from the staid news magazine is boldly titled "How Twitter will change the way we live."
The article, written by Steven Johnson of outside.in, describes the microblogging platform with the kind of hyperbolized language that would make a grad student blush ("…it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles"), but it's well worth a read.
Will Twitter's 140-character status update change the way we live? Hardly.
Johnson points out that Twitter is seemingly letting us monitor exactly what people are talking about at this very moment on a national level, but the main argument for Twitter's legacy is the way users and outside developers have shaped the product. As Johnson puts it, the plethora of third-party apps and websites utilizing Twitter are like "inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and seeing that your customers have of their own accord figured out a way to turn it into a microwave."
Twitter will undoubtedly fizzle at some point, just like internet sensations AOL, Yahoo, Friendster, and MySpace all have. And as marketers continue to find ways to use the tool for their needs, Time's thesis -- that "end-user innovation" is the most important factor -- may be worth considering.
