McGEE, Barry. (2010)

Has Twitter Hit The Mainstream?

January 27, 2009 at 12:13 · Filed under Social Media

I asked my Twitter followers this week if they thought Twitter had hit the mainstream. Of those who replied, all said that in their opinion, it had not.  I tend to agree but I can’t help but think Twitter is very much on the cusp of it and I can’t help but wonder, at the end of 2009, will it be as commonplace in conversation as Facebook or mySpace?

According to Hitwise, Twitter use has rocketed over 1000% in the UK in the last year. This is phenomenal growth by anyone’s standards, and helps explains why Twitter has struggled to maintain consistent uptime in the last year as they strive to cope with surging demand. This week, market share also surpassed social media giant Digg for the first time.

Over the last year many, many people have embraced the idea of conveying a succinct nugget of opinion, trivia or irrelevant minutia to friends and strangers alike, in less than 140 characters. These include celebrities Jonathon Ross, Stephen Fry and John Cleese.

Ross, in particular, has helped raise the profile of Twitter significantly as he posted while suspended from the BBC for making naughty phone calls on Radio 2. The mainstream media soon picked up on this and suddenly Twitter was being mentioned on TV, radio and newspapers nationwide.

Twitter hit the news once more when the first pictures emerged of the Hudson plane crash in New York on TwitPic, a third party site used to post image to Twitter. The guy who took the pictures was interviewed on many major news outlets worldwide, where he prefaced all questions with an explanation of Twitter.

Twitter was also a constant source of information when the attacks on Gaza started. with nearly all journalists banned from entering the region, many were forced to report what they had read on Twitter rather than what they had seen themselves. Many had also used Twitter to keep abreast of events during the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

This week, the big conversation on Twitter was all about Obama’s Inauguration, with many Tweeting from the actual event.

However, ask 10 people walking down your local high street asking people about Twitter and you’re very likely to be greeted with blank expressions. To become a “household name” takes alot more than just wooing the tech savvy.

Twitter has also not revealed how it intends to monetize. Millions of visitors is all well and good but if they are not making you a return, you’re basically a charity, aren’t you? I can’t help but think whenever they do eventually introduce a system to make money, will this curb the growth?

What do you think? Will Twitter ever make the mainstream?

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What is Spotify? – An Online Jukebox!

January 18, 2009 at 14:24 · Filed under Music, Social Media

I’ve always been a big fan of music and remember fondly the heady days of free (if illegal) music downloading with Napster circa 2001. Then of course,  the music big wigs, woke up smelled the coffee and then realised it was being stole from under their noses. They subsequently took action and all free Napster bit the dust.

Since then, those unwilling to pay for downloading listening pleasure, have had to use Bittorrent or dubious peer-to-peer applications such as Limewire to obtain their favourite music, navigating the minefield of spy ware and trojans viruses which are riddled through both.

The other alternative is the immensely popular Last FM, with more than 21 million users in over 200 different countries. Last FM has been around for almost 7 years and is the undisputed king of streaming personalised music choice. However, I have now found an alternative in Spotify, which also complements Last.fm by hooking into it’s audioscrobbling service..

Spotify is a Swedish based service which streams music instantly to your computer via a lightweight downloadable app, available for Windows or Mac. You can search for artists, tracks or albums in a huge range of genres and listen to them all, free!

The tracks are interspersed with adverts every now and again but I find them largely unobtrusive, certainly better than many major radio stations. There are also banner ads integrated into the app but all advertising can be removed by paying for a premium service.

The songs stream instantly for anyone with a decent net connection and songs are cached on your computer for your next play. You can however, choose how much of your memory you want to allocate for caching.

All songs are licenced to play online although none can be downloaded, which is why it will never kill iTunes.

I’m guessing only a handful of record labels have signed up as there are some albums I can’t find so I hope more will follow giving a wider range of music to choose from.

There is also a social side (isn’t there always?) to Spotify, with the ability to share playlists and tracks with friends.

Personally, I think it’s great, it looks great, it’s very easy to use and I’m addicted to playing with it.. I’m finding songs I haven’t heard in years, good times. I just hope they don’t start charging further down the line when they build up a following, bad times.

Right now it’s still in beta, and it was invite only, but I found this open link on Twitter during the week and half the office is now addicted to it, try it out for yourself and let me know what you think!

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