Recently I have read a few articles surrounding Twitter's future. Mainly pessimistic responses to the age old question "Will it survive the test of time?". I am so very tired of the lack of positive life displayed by so many journalists - why must they make the world so depressing all the time!

Interestingly, some of the best examples of 'failed' social networks are Friends Reunited and MySpace. Anyone involved in the Music scene may argue immediatley that MySpace has not failed; it just got a tad distracted. And Dennis Publishing found 25 million reasons to buy Friends Reunited which I thought had failed the test of time.

The main worry is the Twitter users will at some point find a new site to play with similar to many MySpacers found FaceBook etc etc. These comments feel uneducated. Yes, people will play with it and decide they don't like it - just like channel five :) and yes competition is highly likely, but have these authors actually looked at Twitter? If we focused on these concerns we would all still be writing with a quill and looking for the mail coach.

Twitter will survive and this is why:-

1. Twitter brings together new and old, you can follow celebrities like on MySpace, you can keep up to date with what your friends and family are doing like FaceBook, you can network for business or getting a job like LinkedIn, you can keep up to date with the news like RSS, you can communicate like email, you can belong to communities like forums and you can blog - in a micro format which is a lot easier. It does all these things in a very simple and easy way with a very low barrier to entry - you can start engaging very quickly before learning what a hash tag is.

2. And let's not forget for many millions it is something to use our Smart Phones / iPhones for to tell everyone where we are in real time - which has a strange sort of satisfaction to it.

3. The unique 140 character limit we now call micro blogging should have been called headline blogging! It is enough to catch the eye and say one thing quickly, it stops waffle! It is easy and fun to read lots of headlines.

4. The incredible open API is a Twitter winner. I read somewhere that only 8% of Twitter users actually go to Twitter.com, the rest are using desktop applications or mobile applications like TweetDeck or Tweetie. This is an amazing achievement - Twitter has broken out of the Browser and is on the desktop and the phone! This enlarged footprint will take longer to erode.

5. Even more amazing are all the services that interact with Twitter such as TweetPic, conference back channels or TwitterJobSearch. 

6. Twitter is typically an open network, you can see my followers and I can see yours. The key to social networking is seeing the network, and they have that right.

7. Trending and real time search will stay! Who does not find it interesting to see what the world is talking about! I am looking forward to being able to see trends for just the UK. The power of all the data and outgoing hyper links is more than enough to truly scare Google it makes Google look like the slow plodding grand daddy of web search! 

 

So are you on Twitter? Is your company on Twitter? And if not, Why Not?