What we should expect from Twitter use hinges on the extent to which it is a conversation versus a broadcast platform.  There is a great article on this here: link.  My initial inclination is to say that Twitter is more of a broadcast platform because a lot of use centers around events and news.  Musicians and celebrities have found Twitter extremely useful for connecting with fans.  This is because they usually have announcements many people are interested in.  Unfortunately they can’t write back to all 1M of their followers if they respond.  (This means you Ashton Kutcher! Why won’t you reply to my tweets?!)

I personally tend to use Twitter to send messages to a certain group of people in my social network.  These friends are primarily marketers and entrepreneurs in the tech space.  My twitter graph is more like a small focused community rather than a general broadcasting space.  This is one reason I post updates to Twitter more than Facebook.  My Facebook account isn’t yet set up to reach particular audiences based on interest.

We can look to the past to understand Twitter’s future

The main reason the Twitter research results should not be surprising is past online community studies.  When analyzing the frequency of comments posted on blogs, a pattern known as the 90-9-1 rule was found.  This means that for an online community

• 90 % of users are views
• 9 % are moderate contributors
• 1% are heavy contributors

But we also know a rule called the 80-20 rule.  This suggests that 20% of your users create all the content. Link

The answer for Twitter is its in a ballpark somewhere in between.  As I have graphed below, the reason for differences in participation rates depends on at least 2 main factors.  These are:

• Privacy of the community
• Ease of participation

As privacy gets higher, the community usually gets smaller and participants are more likely to post.  Small communities with focused target markets often get higher participation and user loyalty.

Ease of participation is very straightforward.  The lower the effort to participate, the more people will contribute.  This is obvious when you think about the number of people who write blog posts versus the number that update their Facebook status. Link.

We see from this simple diagram that the 90-10-1 and 80-20 rules make up frontiers based on the 2 parameters.  Although numbers are not exact, a visual reference lets us put the report results in perspective. By comparing services, we see that Twitter is not really unusual.  Participation falls between Facebook status updates and writing Blog posts.  It would be interesting to know if smart phone adoption is raising participation levels since it lowers the effort required to contribute to online communities.

So if you are starting your own online community or service, do not get caught off guard by your analytics.  Make sure to form realistic expectations based of research and focus on more pressing problems, such as growth rates and a business model that works.

Coca-Cola?

Some local beer?  (Kilimanjaro beer.  They got the marketing to tourists thing down)

Nope.  The ads you see plastered on every store in Tanzania are for cell phone carriers.  It turns out that 4 carriers are in brutal competition to capture the market.  These are tiGO, Celtell, Zantel and Vodacom.

(did GoLoco steal its logo from tiGO or the other way around)

Cell phones the most revolutionary thing to come to Africa in decades.  It was always too expensive to run copper lines so not many people had them.  Now you get crystal clear coverage right in the middle of the Serengeti.

It isn’t cheap though.  In Tanzania you are charged for outgoing calls by the second.  Everything is prepaid, and text messages are free.

This is a country where people walk miles just to go to the market to trade goods.  Not many people have cars and the ability to coordinate over distance changes everything.  As such, everyone wants to have a phone and companies are more than happy to compete for their business.

This is because of the fragmented mobile device market of which currently includes 10M iPhones or so.

Looking at only iPhones underestimates the Apple application market

Sure Apple sold 10M iphones in the last year, but what about the iPod Touch?  It also runs apps.  The iPod touch addresses a whole other market outside the cell phone market.  I haven’t seen many sales estimates that include touch numbers however.

The richly featured iPod touch may be only be the start. The cost of materials for the iPhone has been reduced to only $174.33.  With much lower component costs, Apple can now move features such as an accelerometer into lower end iPod models.

Mobile Platform Endgame

Apple will eventually extend the iPhone/touch OS platform backward into their entire product line.  Apple has already sold 200M iPods and their batteries are slowly losing their ability to hold a charge.  As consumers refresh their aging MP3 players, they will be phased on to apples new mobile version of OS X and apps such as more cowbell will gain whole new audiences to entertain.

Enterprises realize benefits from unified contacts

One of the biggest new areas in enterprise these days is unified communications. These UC systems integrate IM, Mail, Voice, and Video into one unified client.  My current company, Cisco, is a leader in this area and you can see an example of their UC client here

The main point here is, rather than have an IM contact id, e-mail contact id, and phone number, your contact can be represented by exactly what he/she is, ONE person.  With UC, you can now select how you want to communicate with this person.  This in turn eases collaboration within an organization.

Internet service aggregation clients bridge part of the gap

Since IM clients and social networks cannot speak with each other, users are forced to log in to each service individually.  This can be a pain if you and your friends belong to a bunch of different services.

Several products are now aggregating your online identity.  Adium is an IM client on the Mac that has been doing this for years.  It allows you to see contact from AOL, Gmail, Yahoo Chat, etc.. all in one client.  FriendFeed is a newcomer that lets you get output from feeds for all you favorite internet services (Facebook, Google Reader, LinkedIn, Pandora).

With these services, users no longer have to log into a bunch of different services to access their distributed contacts.

Digsby takes things a step forward

The new client Disby allows a user to login to E-mail, IM Clients, and Social Networks at the same time.  It provides mail notification, IM chats, and status updates in a unified interface.  One feature I am most impressed with is the ability to combine contacts (Trillian also allows this) from the same person.  For instance, if I have a contact Annie, who is my friend on both AOL and Gchat, I can combine them so Annie’s name only shows up once in my contact list.

Why not Find, Combine, and Sync all my Contacts?

Why should I have to tell these services what contacts are the same person?  Since, they have access to my services and social graphs, they should be able to mine data from them.  With this data, most of the possible merges can be inferred.  In fact, most of my friends’ screen names are similar enough that screen name data alone should be enough. A CEO of a popular Silicon Valley web 2.0 start-up informed me Tuesday that several new companies are trying crack this problem using existing graphs from services such as FriendFeed.

Does anyone know of any promising entrants in this area?