I hear so much debate from people about Twitter.  Is it a fad?  Will it be gone in two years?  Will it explode with ‘facebook type’ exponential growth?  I think it safe to say that Twitter is perched atop or just nanometers shy of the peak of Gartners famous hype cycle.  Those who ask these questions need to look at what Twitter does on a more macro level.  Use from the likes of The Weather Channel, CNN  and small T.V. markets nationwide Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, and his staff probably felt that gaining visibility and users was the hard part.  The reality is the hard part has just started.

Twitter has taken the mainstream by storm from Oprah, The Colbert Show, CNN and even Barack Obama.  Twitter will now suffer the plunge into what is known as the trough of disillusionment.  This occurs when a technology fails to meet expectations and it quickly becomes unfashionable, therefore leading to less media attention and public visibility.  The product itself, Twitter, is starting to slide down into this trough.  Will its benefits become widely demonstrated?  Will it stabilize?  You can make your predictions as you will, but Twitter has offered up something more to the world.  Real-time communication that is customizable, social and search-able.  Leo LaPorte of TWiT.tv has stated that Twitter is not real-time because you need to ‘refresh’ the page to see updates comments.  I would say this is a small technicality.  Aggregater services like FriendFeed are ‘truly’ real-time where updates come in as they are pushed to FriendFeed’s servers and appear with no action required from the user.

Twitter has pushed this social real-time connectivity to the mainstream like no other platform, even leading monsters like Facebook to follow suit by re-designing their users homepage.  Even Google has been working on what many call a possible revolutionary platform known as Wave.  Wave provides real-time communications and may very well re-invent how we communicate online in the long haul.

Twitter as a company may have been the catalyst to mainstream the idea, but it won’t be the last as other tech giants and new start-ups take aim on real-time communications.  This is only the beginning as we embark on another shift on the Internet.  Another question to ponder is; are these new ‘real-time communications’ tools considered web 3.0?  Ahh, let’s not even go there!