Tommy Collison

Comments are open at the bottom for you to add your thoughts. Any and all input welcomed.

Has it ever occured to how how powerful Twitter really is? I’m not only talking about Twitter as a service either. It’s more the people on it. How much power they hold.

I decided to be scientific about it. I’d do an experiment. I’d get one of the big shot tweeters to tweet a pretty general question, and watch the response. Simple enough. I chose a big shot twitter-er that I’d had dealings with before, who’s always willing to help out with things, and who also has 507,974 followers. The man is Stephen Fry.

I’d been watching him for a while, marvelling just how many responses the man gets to his tweets, no matter what the content. Take this one for example:

As soon as I saw this, I quickly did a search through tweets for ones containing ‘@stephenfry’ (ones people direct toward him). My mouth literally dropped open at how many tweets I saw. Most of them were simple ones like ‘@stephenfry Hope you feel better soon x’. As I watched these sorts of tweets flood in, I began to think.. is this only the tip of the iceberg? Sure, most of these were just e-get well cards, but does that mean that’s all they could be? Fry has a massive following hanging on his every word. Could that be harnessed?

So I knocked off 3 quick DMs: (read from the bottom up)

9 minutes later, what floats into my inbox?

And what appeared on Stephen’s Twitter stream?

Booyaa!

After doing my mini celebratory jig, I again pointed my browser toward a twitter search for @stephenfry. I arrived roughly 30 seconds after his tweet was sent, and look what I saw:

and that’s only the ones I can display in one browser window!

I left the browser open about 2-3 minutes, and look what I saw when I looked again:

What that yellow box is that in the time that Firefox has taken to load up that page, 289 tweets have been posted having @stephenfry in them somewhere.

I counted up the responses in the first 30 minutes of his tweet, there was roughly 140 responses. I split these into categories: Positive, negative, ‘what is digg?’ and Advising to use something different

Negative: 50
Positive: 42
‘What is digg?’: 24
Advising something different: 25

As they were advising, Reddit.com got 21 votes, Stumble Upon got 3 and Delicious.com got 1.

And if we hone in on the Advice slice…

This is definitely something to mull over. Did you realize that Twitter folk had such power to gain responses and following? I didn’t. Well, do now. Finally, it struck me as I went through the responses, just how much some people adore Fry.. take a look:

This woman, chances are who’s never met Fry is.. actually I’m not quite sure how to describe it. Some people literally do just idolize him.

Again:

Just following him like sheep. Random twitter person sees Fry doing something, random twitter person does same.

Not sure if I find this odd or not, but it’s certainly startling…

So, in closing, what have we learned? What do we take away from this? What other uses of this instant communication with several hundred thousand people can we have? OK, getting well wishes about sore tummies is grand, but think of the overall value. News would become worldwide within 10 minutes. That’s what’d be the value.

You could promote events, like Twestivals or charities, and they’d get mounds of support. You could keep millions up to date with events like G8 summits or involve them all in contests for radio shows. The list is as varied as it is endless!

Twitter is becoming the latest thing to bring us all things instantaneously. We no longer have to wait for our news. It’s there for us.

Fry doesn’t prove this. He’s an example of Twitter’s greatest feature.  The fact that you can ask a question and get instant answers to it. People you have no previous contact with come and answer you, and that’s the amazing social dynamics of Twitter that just isn’t there in email.

With my Fry example, the Gutenberg example isn’t strictly true. Fry wasn’t spreading news. If he’d said ‘OMG just saw three buses do flip over on the N1′, that’d be news, and it’d be like Gutenberg. Also, Gutenberg was circumventing those kings and popes, while Twitter isn’t. Still, my Fry example may not fit into the Gutenberg example, but so much of Twitter does

Many thanks to Stephen Fry on this post, for DMing me back so quick and participating. You can follow Stephen on Twitter here. Thanks also to Darragh for a quick hand with part of this also