I'd like to see some actual numbers on all this because I don't think most people Twitter. You hear all these wild numbers about how twitter is growing and growing but that's just people who visit it. I visit it to check on a few people but I'd never use it.
More to the point, in my actual life I know no one who Twitters (or tweets, or whatever). But I do know tons of people who have tried and given up on it.
So is it possible that, as a percentage of society, almost none of us Twitter?
Same here. As far as I can tell most of the hype about Twitter is driven by the fact that the people most in control of the popular tech media (slowly expanding to media generally) are also the ones who benefit most from Twitter's success. So every single publicity whore tech blogger is out there evangelizing twitter precisely because they see it as a way to drive people to their blogs where they can make money through ads.
We still have almost no evidence as far as I can tell that Twitter is being adopted as a widespread general communication tool. That's not to say that it won't, just that what we see now is still 90% hype driven and it's anybody's guess whether the thing will collapse or not when the hype dies down. For communication among my friends I still vastly prefer instant messaging which has so many features that twitter and SMS don't that using twitter feels like returning to the stone age.
It's the same with many of these big niche products. Nothing wrong with niche, but the people who call FriendFeed the wave of the future are the people who have the most to benefit from FriendFeed's becoming huge.
Twitter is miniature compared to many of the huge networks out there. Bebo, Hi5, Orkut are all huger than Twitter, last I checked. (EDIT: I checked after posting this and Twitter's past all of them globally according to Alexa, but not in terms of users.) I don't go out of my way to analyze Facebook, but I know that a Facebook fan page having a million followers is fairly routine, even for relatively minor fan pages. Getting followers on Facebook is much easier than it is on Twitter, and it gives you the exact same relationship with your audience, but even stronger because there's comment/photo/video support.
I don't mind Twitter at all - I wish more web sites would be so elegant - but a lot of the hype about Twitter being the "next big thing" is only half true. It's the NBT in that it succinctly represents a lot of the coolest things about the Internet, but it's not the only site to do that and it's one of the smaller examples out there.
