If Markets Are Conversations Then Twitter Is Money
Twitter is the conversation. David Weinberger gets it right enough. — One of the themes coming through loud and clear in the twitterverse is that many of us are a bit jaded about blogging. Marshall Kirkpatrick wants to Twitter instead of blogging.
Context & Ripple Effects
Governor's riff lands three months into Twitter's breakout spring: the service had already been flagged as a candidate control layer for connected homes by O'Reilly Network, gone head-to-head with Dodgeball as the most flaunted messaging rival at South by Southwest 2007, and drawn both a predicted implosion and a critic calling it inane and dangerous. Against that noise, he reaches for the oldest shorthand in the cluetrain canon — 'Markets Are Conversations,' now anchored to David Weinberger's entity — and re-prices the service: the conversation stream is itself the asset.
The immediate provocation is blogger fatigue among Twitter's earliest power users. Marshall Kirkpatrick has said outright that he prefers Twitter to blogging, and Governor reads that mood as the theme of the twitterverse — which matters because these are the people whose blogs set the tech conversation's agenda.
First-order effects
- Marshall Kirkpatrick's declared preference for Twitter over blogging marks high-frequency tech bloggers shifting their primary publishing surface from long posts with comment threads to a single shared message stream, draining attention from the blogs that hosted the conversation.
- Framing habitual users' chatter as 'one loud voice' — and that voice as money rather than noise — hands Twitter a business identity it did not have when it was merely the flashier of two South-by-Southwest rivals.
Second-order effects
- Dodgeball, Twitter's confirmed head-to-head competitor at SXSW 2007 for the same broadcast-to-friends behavior, now contests a category whose leading narrative claims economic value, raising the stakes of its own product choices.
- If the stream is money, third parties will hack Twitter beyond chat into utilities — exactly the move the rumored prediction that Twitter 'will be hacked into a genuinely useful service' anticipated, and the direction O'Reilly Network's home-device proposal pointed in March 2007.
Third-order effects
- If Weinberger's markets-as-conversations thesis holds at message-stream scale, commercial value migrates from destination websites toward the conversational layer itself, making whoever hosts the stream the settlement point for attention — Governor's 'money.'
- Blogger fatigue among early adopters points to a structural split in publishing: fast conversational streams for the live discussion, slow archival blogs for the record — with influence accruing to the layer where the crowd actually talks.
The trend: Public conversation among tech early adopters is migrating from owned blogs to shared microblogging streams, and whoever operates that stream inherits the market-making role the cluetrain manifesto assigned to conversation itself.