Twitter prints are on the rise in posters, screensavers, wallpaper
As we wrote about last month in “Twitter’s Real-Time Search is Melting Google,” the growing popularity of Twitter, which allows people to respond in near real-time to Tweets, and is a shoe-in for young people perpetuating the killer app wars, again takes center stage in our digital lifestyle round-up this week.
First, the Facebook talks of buying Twitter (for a reported $500 million despite the fact that it does not yet have a viable business model) broke down, so Facebook is launching their own Twitter-like app called “The Stream.” Like its oh-so-original name, the feature allows users’ friends on Facebook to showcase real-time activities based on the answer to the question “What’s on your mind?” (vs. “What are you doing?” on Twitter) in an on-going status feed. Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “the stream” is an evolution towards real-time communication among Facebook friends and contacts in terms of communicating moods and feelings. The stream feature will also be present on its public pages so that organizations who use Facebook can broadcast their news across Facebook audiences. With this move, Facebook is dropping its friends limit of 5,000 for public pages. So basically, Obama’s latest news can pop-up on people’s Facebook News Feeds faster than every 10 minutes (the original time it took for Facebook News Feeds to update on a fast-day), and send out to “the search” users. Other quite useful apps are that musicians will be able to promote tours in a heartbeat, literally, but even better, fans%uFFFD whose hearts musicians have won will be able to report on musicians%uFFFD performances to other fans in less time than an emo pop song. The Streaming Tweets. See?
You can see why print newspapers are having a cow. Once the fastest media around with their 24-hour turn-around, they were usurped ages ago by the Internet, and now, there’s just no way they can compete with Tweets and the streams. Even the old-school Internet is freaking. Google, for example might have a list of stories on the same topic but it can take more than 12 hours -which, let’s face it, is a lifetime. Even
Facebooks%uFFFD news updates admitted to a lengthy 10 minutes. Last week, the Google CEO sounded like the Mean Girls of New Media when he proclaimed that Twitter was “the poor man’s email.” Clearly he%uFFFDs forgotten that we’re a tech-savvy generation in a recession.
Which brings us to the next topic -the growing importance of Twitter correspondents. For real, Sky News from the UK hired a Twitter Correspondent, Ruth Barnett, whose sole job is to search Twitter for breaking news, which, as illustrated with the plane in the Hudson River story, or the skier who died in the Alps story, was picked up via personal Twitters way before mainstream late-breaking news caught up. So while CNN, for example, realized they needed to get on it and launched iReports from citizen journalists with video cams, looks like they are now going to have to add a Twitter staffer to stay competitive in the microblogging arena.
With microblogging growing, the days of big news corps, or at least the way they currently are structured, may be numbered.
Stay tuned for more from Label Networks%uFFFD Spring Study 2009 and 4th annual Digital Youth Culture Lifestyle Report 2009.
