Twitter and the Disruption of Mainstream Media

Things move fast in the Web 2.0 world and those of us who want to keep up have to be open to changing our opinions quickly as the environment changes. Take Twitter, for instance.

Regarding Twitter, in April I was poised as elegantly as I could manage, on the fence.

Since then I have dallied with Twitter, an on-again, off-again sort of affair.

Then just over a week ago, I was on Twitter and so was Frank Arrigo from Microsoft, who then realized I was just down the road from where TechEd was happening. Which meant I got a very welcome last-minute invitation to spend what turned out to be a most enjoyable and thought-stimulating session as part of the panel for the Bloggers Lunch at TechEd. After all, for a blogger what’s the next best thing to blogging if not hanging out with other bloggers talking about blogging and social media!?

Blogs can be fast. Frank is a prolific blogger and I am fairly frequent, but I doubt that that particular exchange or that outcome would have come about just from our blogging.

So while blogs are demonstrably disruptive of older forms of media, Twitter/Pownce type “mini-blogging” is threatening to become significantly more disruptive than “regular” blogging.

In Get ready for the Twitterization of mainstream media, David Berlind of ZDNet tells a story highlighting his own experiences with new, disruptive online technologies from back in the (early 1990s) Compuserve days, right up till now and his obviously mixed feelings about Twitter and its pals such as Pownce. My early training as an historian makes me a sucker for such detailed stories and as an old Compuserve warrior I had a nice nostalgic moment.

But more interesting for me were his scenarios, illustrating how such technology could displace even such highly priced services to investors and traders as provided by Bloomberg and Reuters.

Investors subscribe to these services and sit in front of giant consoles as editors from these organizations spit out one-liners at them — one-liners with material information to investors — in near real-time.

One-liners? As he points out, that’s what we do with Twitter. That’s how I knew Frank was in my neighbourhood, how he found out I was just down the road, how I got invited.

So what if the one-liners were coming from experts who were not on Blooomberg or Reuters but nevertheless respected by investors and traders and using a Twitter-type technology?

Whereas Bloomberg puts a sophisticated system in the hands of an exclusive group of people on a private network, Twitter and Pownce make such a system available to everyone on the Web.

Disruptive indeed!

If you want a break from Tweets, David Berlind’s is a juicy article, especially in my view because he is not afraid to tell the story of the new new things back then that he missed or resisted. Good war stories, even more interesting in the prognostication department.

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