Twitter: Connection Generator or Content Generator

I’m sure the following scenarios would be familiar to most people… If you look carefully at what is being said or written in the Media (Television / Newspapers)… news on “My Name is Khan” – the movie, about Shah Rukh Khan’s comments and many other related titbits. Few months back it was Sashi Tharoor and about what he said (the cattle class comments), and what he was saying thereof. Another regular feature in the news channels happens to be what the latest tweets are on specific topics or current events… suddenly you see that Twitter is also about content…

The idea of Twitter was to provide a simple platform for the online users to update their status; and for their friends and followers to see and respond. The idea of keeping it under 140 characters was to make the integration with existing SMS platforms easier…. The idea has been very successful, and people have started taking on to Twitter a big way… The stats say that almost 40-45% of Twitter traffic is from Mobile platforms and the remaining from the web. The whole idea of Twitter was on ease of connecting and getting connected…. I’m sure using Twitter for content creation would have been last thing in the minds of the creators of Twitter.

The media (new or traditional) survives on content. The fresher and exclusive the content the better it is. Traditionally, media companies’ generated content mostly from internal sources (Editors, journalists, reporters etc); External (Freelancers, writers,) and Syndicated content (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, PTI, etc)… and there was a cost attached to these sources of content. With the advent of the web and specifically the web 2.0, a free source of content was discovered – User Generated Content. And when the user is a celebrity, with some media sell-able value attached…the content becomes golden; Imagine if a newspaper or TV carries free content sourced from tweets, they could easily fill up columns or minutes of prime-time news…which otherwise they would need to have filled with paid content….

The way things are shaping up – Twitter would soon become a content generator for media companies and might even be supplying most of the content… Maybe, just maybe – some sort of content syndication (or content generator) could the elusive business model that Twitter can look forward to make money ;)

It is a marriage of convenience. Content starved media feeds of the tweets; and in return Twitter gets free publicity…which would translate into more people joining the twitter platform, and more tweets being generated…thus more content being published for the media to consume…

This looks like a story that will ‘live happily ever after’ :)

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