Following the breaking news of president Obama’s first tweet yesterday I had a few social network thoughts, mainly, how come a person that used ground breaking methods on Web 2.0 and social space innovative campaigning use, for the first time, one of the leading internet applications today (Twitter) only one year into his presidency?. And why would he share this with the rest of the world, I mean he got like 40 million followers on Twitter, and I’m pretty sure that at least some of them at least thought that it was Obama tweeting away, and sharing his thoughts with them, live, via Twitter.
Not so.
No one is really surprised, it doesn’t mean that Obama is a black hat Twitter user that frauds people into following him, he just has better things to do, AND (and this is the important thing here) he doesnt really get it, it would take too much of his time to learn how to use this tool. He also got a country to run (some say the whole world).
“It was just way too much trouble so I gave it up”
The person who said that worked thousnads of hours building an operating system and than leading a technological change the likes the world has never seen. Its Bill Gates. He was talking about Facebook, and he said that when he left FB, only to rejoin Facebook – yeap, yesterday.
So what are we seeing here? Technology is first embraced by those who are keen to use it, only once there is a critical mass of users everyone joins in, it was the same thing with cell phones and the internet and many other things (check out Seth Godin’s Purple Cow) Facebook has been breaking records for a while and then it just stopped and wondered what we become of it, this was a year ago, now FB is back to leading the charts, even making some of the big G’s people fear its growth and potential, Twitter has become what it should be, a fast platform for fast notes, it has already made its mark on history with the Iran inner politics turmoil, both those sites are here to stay, even Obama and Gates get that.
Last thing, both cases mentioned about referred to the Haiti crisis, which is something that I wanted to look into here, on my next post (the next post will be the Haiti crisis on the internet)
