August 5, 2010

By Luis Zaffirini

In just the past year, the business of Twitter has moved strategically from offering the world the opportunity to read about the mundane details of our personal lives to an important information aggregator and useful tool. Looking back on my first few tweets, I am a little appalled. They were literally a bunch of status updates with rather trivial details about my personal life. Not exactly riveting stuff.

What's happened in four short years is that its contents has changed overtime from asking people what are you doing? to asking what's happening? That might not seem like a really big difference, but for such a newbie website, it's huge. And for @nrlc (our name on Twitter), it has been a real boon.

Two years ago I was telling the world: "I'm eating grapefruit," "I'm watching TV," and "I'm at work." Today I'm using the exact same platform to spread news stories, many of which originate right here in the NRLC office, to grassroots pro-lifers, journalists, and curious observers.

This change reflects not just my own attitudes about the Twitter platform but also the changes in how Twitter markets itself. Here's a little background.

Twitter originated as a status update platform, meaning people already familiar with other social networking sites (such as Facebook) could use it to tell other people what they were up to--and that's about it. Twitter was meant to be a stripped-down version of the status updates, allowing users to express themselves as they would on other sites, but in a highly abbreviated form: a maximum of 140 characters. Another way to look at it is micro-blogging--condensing an entire blog entry into a sentence.

This experiment in communication got a boost from exposure by media and celebrities alike and people signed up by the millions. Twitter experienced a particular spike in late 2009. However, by early 2010, tech blogs were discussing how a substantial portion of these new millions were largely inactive and dropping off.

What was really happening was that people were learning what Twitter was best used for: quickly disseminating bits of information. Accounts were dropping-off and becoming inactive as users found something other than what they expected.

But a great number of users had learned to hone this technology to their advantage. Among those who understood the real potential of Twitter is National Right to Life. You can join in at http://twitter.com/nrlc.

Among the greatest advantages of the Twitter platform is the immediacy of publication, the open channel to a tremendous variety of audiences, and the way it builds a community around a common interest. NRLC is able to publish unique news articles, press releases, and thoughts in a way that can be easily searched for and shared, keeping connected grassroots pro-lifers updated and exposing new audiences to good information on life issues.

Please send all of your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are now following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha.

Part Three
Part One