.. este será otro de esos posts que dedico a los no-creyentes de este fenómeno (mundial) .. allá va: a través del enorme blog de o’reilly radar (que sigo habitualmente), llego a techcrunch, y leo que «twitter is having its hockey stick moment, in terms of its growth just shooting up (…) If it doesn’t break up from all the pressure and is able to keep its service up and running more or less, it could soon—gasp!—break into the mainstream» .. (el gráfico adjunto lo dice todo) .. aunque en mi (humilde) opinión todavía queda bastante para que tuiter se consolide, sí que es verdad que parece que se va alejando (poco a poco) del fenómeno «nicho», del fenómeno friki .. ¿qué opinais?? ..

.. algo así apuntan desde o’reilly en su último informe sobre tuiter: «we found that twitter’s user base grew more than 500 percent from October 2007 to October 2008. But we were even more interested to discover that the service has enjoyed an usual effect: as more and more people have joined, the percentage of active users has remained constant at about 20% (approximately 20 percent post daily and about eight percent post more than 100 times a month)» (yo creo que estoy en ese ocho por ciento .. ooops !! heavy user 😉 )..

.. por cierto, me ha parecido maravillosa la introducción de tim o’reilly en dicho informe .. la reproduzco tal cuál aquí .. y recomiendo su lectura a todo el que todavía no se haya iniciado en el microbloging (lease twitter, plurk, etc.) porque os garantizo que refleja muy bien lo que por lo menos sentí yo al principio 😉 ..

«Like a lot of people, I didn’t think much of Twitter at first. I signed up to check it out, but didn’t find much there for me. I wasn’t interested in hearing about where people were having coffee, what they had for dinner, or who they were hanging out with. It seemed like a great application for people with too much time on their hands.
But some months later I was back. Because Twitter lets anyone “follow” any other user, rather than requesting a formal declaration of “friendship,” and because I’m a well-known person, one day I realized that I had about 5000 people following me on Twitter, waiting to hear from me. Huh? I’d better give them something to follow, I thought.
So I started posting. But because I’m a serious guy, I tended to post links to what I was reading or writing, not what I was eating or drinking. And I noticed that lots of other people were doing that too. Before long, I found myself using Twitter as my principal source of news, forgoing my RSS reader for the more varied and stimulating flow that comes from people sharing the very best things that they’ve read lately.
And because I was using Twhirl, a Twitter client that has an easy button for “retweeting”—that is, passing on the best tweets from someone you’re following, I soon found that I had a great opportunity to bring attention to insights from people who had fewer followers than I did. All those pieces I read that I couldn’t get around to writing a full blog post about could be retweeted in an instant. I’ve now got about 12,000 direct followers, but calculations by some of the Twitter influence measurement sites project that that means I have potential access to millions of Twitter users, as others retweet my most relevant
comments. What’s more, the network is still young.At the same time as I found Twitter a great tool in my role as an information switchboard for people who care about new trends in technology, I also came to appreciate its original promise, as a tool for keeping in touch with people’s ordinary lives. I learn from my brother’s tweets that my niece has a new boyfriend, that his other daughter is home visiting from college. I gain a new kind of ambient intimacy with members of my own family. And before long, I’m tweeting personal bits too. It’s been a long day, I’m relaxing and making raspberry jam. “How much sugar do you use?” asks one follower. “However much you like, if you use Pomona’s Universal Pectin,” I reply. And so, through the minutia of casual interaction, we see the power of conversational marketing, as ordinary people share what they do and what they care about.
And of course, from there, I learn to post teasers about my own company’s products. I share product announcements, ask for advice about what questions to ask panelists I’m interviewing on stage at my conferences, confident that I can reach thousands of my best customers with a tool so lightweight that it enables conversations that I would never have been able to have otherwise.
So, if you wonder whether Twitter matters for business, remember, if you will, when people new to cell phones used to call each other to report the most trivial details of where they were and what they were doing; remember how blogs at first were thought of merely as personal diaries of no interest to anyone in business, and how they grew up to become the heart of a new media paradigm. For that matter, remember how the personal computer was dismissed by the titans of the computer industry as nothing but a toy.
The future often comes to us in disguise, with toys that grow up to spark a business revolution.
Twitter is like that. Ignore it at your peril. It is already a powerful tool of competitive advantage for companies like O’Reilly Media, Forrester Research, Comcast, and Zappos. This report introduces Twitter, tells war stories from its early practitioners, outlines best practices and the rapidly evolving landscape of third party applications and other tools that help you make use of the Twitter platform.
P.S. I’m @timoreilly on Twitter, just like I’m tim@oreilly.com on email. If your name and brand matters to you, there are advantages to getting on a platform early.»

p.s. ya sabeis que si alguien se introduce (o vuelve) al mundo del microblogging gracias a este post, lo puede compartir (como terapia) con todos los afectados a través de un comentario (o un tuit) 😉 ..