This years hottest venture has to be Twitter.com, you can’t visit a blog or turn on a podcast without reading or hearing about it, TWiT fans know what I’m talking about. The service has been going up and down lately which in turn has created even more buzz as it seems every site has to report on it going down. For the unenlightened I’m tempted to describe Twitter for you as a microblog, but if I hear that term again I’m gonna throw something, so I’ll describe it as basically a collection of Facebook status messages, you have the ability to follow people and read the posts they make throughout the day, in turn people can follow you and read yours. But this isn’t meant to be a post about what Twitter is, you can Google it if you want more information.
At the moment there are a decent amount of users on Twitter, I mean not as much as say Facebook or Myspace, but a good number, the thing is that the service is pretty niche right now and hasn’t caught on in mainstream America. I think it was John Dvorak on TWiT a few days ago who exclaimed that if say a Paris Hilton joined Twitter that it would explode overnight, the servers would most likely just go down from all the traffic, but what if that happened? It may not happen overnight, but what if Twitter became the new Myspace? Would this niche group that uses Twitter at the moment just up and leave making it suddenly uncool to use as a “member” of this tech underworld? It seems like there’s a fine line between this niche group of tech junkies and mainstream America and if Twitter did happen to break that line I wonder if the group that is starting to help it gain popularity would up and leave it as soon as everyone else joined in.
I can’t believe that if Twitter goes mainstream that it’s going to happen anytime soon, but what will be happening soon is that the new 3g iPhone will be released. I wonder if the iPhone would (or soon will) suffer from a similar fate, although maybe fate isn’t the best word for it as Apple and ATT would gain more users then they would lose, but I wonder if the iPhone is destined to become the Motorola Razor of 2008. Rumors of ATT subsidizing Apple’s iPhone have spread across the Internet with some saying that ATT may sell the device for only $199 with a two year contract, this would make the new 3g iPhone more widely used as the everyday consumer would then be more willing to pay for one, therefore flooding the consumer market with the devices. If this happens I believe that the same niche group that uses Twitter, mostly from their iPhones on the go, will abandon the iPhone as it becomes, maybe not mainstream, because I think it could already be called mainstream, but more common causing those who have one today to not be the coolest kid on the block anymore. So I guess the big question here is Does owning an iPhone make you part of the niche group? And if so will this group abandon the iPhone as it will no longer be niche to own one?
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