Which social media apps hit the mainstream?
7th April 2008 by David North
There are loads of social media applications floating about in the vastness of the Internet. Most will disappear into obscurity but a select few will hit the mainstream and will become a household name.
Now I must separate my interpretation of popular and mainstream. Facebook, MySpace and Bebo can truly claim to be mainstream purely from the perspective that they are heavily used by many varying groups of people. Generally speaking here mainstream needs to include people who aren’t just linked with technology and the Internet in some way. This is not to say that these people don’t use these applications of course (although there is another post to come here about the relative coolness to popularity of social media within some quarters). Quite often however people involved with online industries are aware of many more social media tools than Joe Public and this is where the popular social media applications come in.
Twitter is a good example of a popular application that hasn’t as yet gone mainstream. There are many evangelists of Twitter including colleagues of mine and a large number of the Birmingham Bloggers however I’m not sold that Twitter will be able to go mainstream. Sorry guys.
So back to the original question - why the difference? I think this purely has to be judged from the perceived advantages to people over existing technology. Technologists (if that’s a good term to cover them) are always interested in the newest technology and for the most part will try out far more applications than your average Internet user. They are also to a certain extent likely to be more forgiving of growing pains within a service. Your average user is more likely to be inpatient and want to see instant advantages without a lot of hassle and what’s more they want to feel like it something completely new otherwise why bother?
Going back to the Twitter example I can see some excellent uses for the system even for people outside of the technologists camp (thanks to Mark and Kev here for the discussion on Friday). One of Mark’s examples was Universities using Twitter as a broadcast system for cancelled lectures or similar. Certainly Twitter could handle this well but the issue here is that the current user-base isn’t large enough for this to be an effective answer. Now Universities could insist that students are registered for Twitter and have tweets sent to their mobile phones in much the same way as I was required to regularly check my emails for announcements (as reminded by Mark such a long time ago - cheeky get). However there are a couple of missing links here in my opinion.
Firstly someone has got to be enthusiastic enough about the service to sell this to colleagues to even get to the point of deployment. Secondly and most importantly they’ve got to evaluate the additional hassle to get students to register (and chase the ones that don’t). Now again Mark stepped in to say that this could be bundled into the various induction activities which is true. But deep down I know for the most part that this is a lot more long and drawn out process than just taking the student’s mobile number (that is probably already known from enrollment) and using an SMS service to send announcements direct.
Of course I’m sure there will be exceptions to the rule from people particularly enthusiastic about a service but generally speaking there must be a major perceivable benefit to the end user. For this reason many applications remain used by a niche group.
I’d be interested to see other people’s opinions (possibly to change mine) not just about Twitter but also other applications currently not mainstream. Although I would be interested in any suggestions for Twitter uses that might swing my opinion.
As usual I’m bound to change my mind a couple of months down the road and if I do Mark will be waiting!
