brad garland

This shows how geeky I am, I suppose, but I enjoy finding past technological innovations to be able to make analogies to current ones. In communication terms, Twitter (or more likely “short-form communications”) looks to be playing out to be a new form of email. Many people that heard about email a couple decades ago couldn’t see the point. “Why wouldn’t I just call them or leave a message?”, they said. Now email is mission critical in just about every organization. Email didn’t start an upward trend until American Online came out and gave every consumer an email address with their service. And I still remember as a kid being excited about dialing in (2400 baud modem baby!) and hoping to hear those three company defining words, “You’ve got mail!”. YES, somebody emailed me!

So fast forward to 2009 and we have Twitter.

It’s been out for a few years but it really hasn’t taken off until now. One of the key differences that I see between AOL of old and Twitter of today is that AOL’s email was interoperable . AOL emails worked with Prodigy emails or CompuServe emails. What does Twitter work with today? Email was built with a decentralized network in mind but Twitter doesn’t appear to want to play nice. Considering their exponential growth why would they want to though, right? It’s a lot like Facebook in that way I suppose.

Twitter may end up, if not acquired first, to be the new AOL and is definitely put itself on the map for future technology historians.