What’s Next Now

Just a quick note today:

Steve Rubel, who is normally pretty savvy about these things, comes out today and says:

“So you heard it here first, folks. Twitter is peaking. Now I believe Twitter can get through “the dip” that stares them in the face, but it will need to adapt by: keeping its core users intact, remaining attractive to corporations and celebs and by becoming more organized. Search will help with the latter, but expect a battle as Facebook and Friendfeed both make a concerted push to become the place for all your social stuff.”

This is just nuts.   First of all, I’ve been on Friendfeed for at least 18 months now and don’t find much use in it, except that it helps feed my other social media streams to Facebook.  If it went away, I’d find and use other apps to do the same. Friendfeed has yet to break out beyond the more technically literate crowd.  Considering what Facebook is doing with developing its core product, I don’t think Friendfeed has much of a place beyond its existing niche going forward.

Twitter, on the other hand, I predict, is going to be ubiquitous.  Yes, it’s disorganized today, but it provides an information stream that can be sliced and diced in so many different ways that eventually everyone will be able to find an application of it that suits their needs.

The next big step, I think, is for Twitter, or some other programmer, to come up with an address book that allows people to categorize followers and followings by various relationship types.  I think TweetDeck may be the farthest along toward this.  But if the next generation MS Outlook includes the ability to add social media connections to its contacts data (and I believe it will), that may end up being the thing that locks Twitter into the same class as email as a permanent business and personal communication tool.

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