Cutline Speaks

Tweetbruary: The Power of February’s Media Attention on Twitter

posted by Meghan on March 17, 2009

Looking back at the news and events in February, one topic really seems to stand out -- Twitter. Whether people were discussing its growth, its benefits, or its potential -- or just arguing with its skeptics -- Twitter was on a lot of people's minds and in a lot of headlines. The noise and commotion around Twitter reached a peak in the press toward the end of February and led to a few significant events within the first week of March. 

I find it interesting to track how the trends and focus in the press can lead to opportunities and changes for companies. It's captivating when you put your ear to the ground and try to decipher what's about to happen based on the small, sometimes quiet, rumbles around you. February had a lot of those rumbles around Twitter -- both quiet and loud. That's why I'm dubbing the past month "Tweetbruary." Here are a few important trends and events that took place in Tweetbruary that have an impact on decisions and events for Twitter in March:

February 2: The New York Times reports on the mass audience tweeting during the Super Bowl. Check out the video of Twitterati activity throughout the game.

February 11: David Pogue writes a piece in The New York Times about his experience with Twitter. He finds, after much back-and-forth, that Twitter is what you make of it. 

February 15: Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch posts a story titled “Mining the Thought Stream,”
 bringing the reader into an almost sci-fi like world where people can read each others' thoughts and store them in a (data) library. He argues that the "crude beginnings" for something like this already exist in the form of -- you guessed it -- Twitter.

February 22: In a Times Online article, Alain de Botton, author of Status Anxiety takes a deeper dive into the use and meaning of Twitter. He argues that "Twitter represents a way of making sure you are permanently connected to somebody and somebody is permanently connected to you, proving that you are alive. It’s like when a parent goes into a child’s room to check the child is still breathing. It is a giant baby monitor.”

February 24: The rumors about Twitter and Google start popping up, with a piece from Chris O'Brien in the Mercury News on Twitter Search. Google quickly squashed these rumors.

March 2: Google joins Twitter and is Feeling Lucky.

March 4: Facebook responds to Twitter's growth with a homepage revamp that makes it similar to Twitter's real-time feeds. 

March 5: A developer creates TwitteReader to present the latest tweets as individual feed items, which you can cruise through either by reading the short snippets or expanding them out to full posts with a click.

March 5: Rumblings of Twitter ads surface -- advertisements could appear at the end of tweets from specific users, who are paid in return for choosing to carry them on their messages.

March 6: Twitter co-founder Evan Wiliams is invited to the White House to discuss the economic crisis.

March 11: Twitmatic is launched from the creators of Ffwd. It taps into Twitter's public stream and pulls together a grouping of videos people have posted in their tweets.

Today, people are actually getting more information than ever before with Twitter. Now the question is - how can we all harness the power of this information? Join the conversation, if you haven't already. 

Tweet wisely and look us up -- @cutline!

Tags for this post: social networking