FreshNetworks Blog

There’s a lot of talk about Twitter at the moment in the press and across the web. From how brands should be using Twitter, to the impact that mass adoption is having. Twitter is the fastest growing social network, and as we have discussed before this growth is causing Twitter to change and evolve. As more people join they all develop their own ways of using the social media tool, this means that the tools itself changes and develops. Twitter will be very different by the end of this year, and it will be different because of the ways that new members use it.

Innovation is a good thing and social media and online communities are often a source of great and quite rapid innovation. That’s why, the Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks is this talk at TED from Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. He talks about the innovations we have seen in the use of Twitter, from it’s use as a tool to cover and gather information during live events to the use of hashtags to help share information (such as the impact of the snow in the UK earlier this year).

The importance of innovation in product development is known, and in most cases, the uses that people make of your products will be the greatest of all innovations. For a tool like Twitter it is easy for users to innovate, to co-create their own uses of the tool itself. This is one of the reasons it is so popular and one of the reasons for it’s growth. Different people use it in different ways, and each of these innovations improves the experience for all of us.

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Some more reading

• Evan Williams Talking About Twitter at TED 2009 (laughingsquid.com)
• TED talk: Twitter & the power of the unexpected (presentationzen.com)
• Loic Le Meur Blog: Evan Williams of Twitter Speaks at TED (tsurch.com)
• You Can’t Advise Clients on Social Media if You’re Not on Facebook and Twitter (chrisabraham.com)
• Evan Williams on listening to Twitter users | Video on TED.com (tsurch.com)