Twitter’s new homepage is the latest sign that micro-blogging has grown up and may be surging ahead with newfound power.

Blake Bowyer
Media Program Analyst

In this era, it’s not unusual for social media to change and grow, thrive and perish. What isn’t common is organic social media maturation. MySpace underwent an overhaul and a reduction in force when it saw its revenues slipping and membership receding. Facebook tweaked and over-tweaked when it sensed competitors encroaching on its ground. Twitter – and for the sake of this topic, let’s ignore that the service has plenty of its own bugs and no discernible revenue model – however, is embracing the unique role it has discovered, or perhaps, stumbled upon.

Most tellingly, we’ve witnessed a change in Twitter’s own self-image. No longer is it about sharing what people are doing as individuals, but what’s happening in a global community. Conversations have formed around causes, coups, deaths, births, and everything in-between. Many times in the past year, Twitter users have been the first – and sometimes the only – to know. We’ve caught wind of breaking news, had front-row seats to marketing misfires, and engaged in some of the most pointless discussions on-record. However, in the end, Twitter has evolved into a platform on which anyone can, as Twitter now puts it, “discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.”

Even those outside of Twitter have been affected. News outlets of all sizes have been outpaced by tweeting on-lookers and have chosen to embrace the service after seeing value in the conversation. As a skeptic at one point, even I thought the hype surrounding Twitter was just that: hype. However, while Twitter might not do everything it promises in its grand ambition of share and discover, over the past six months, it awoke to find itself with a greater purpose.

Somehow I doubt Mr. Jack Dorsey knew his micro-blogging service would be a crux in the June 2009 Iranian election protests, but it was thrust into the melee. Twitter responded admirably by facilitating information exchange, real-time updates, and on-the-ground communication. The U.S. State Department reached out to Twitter and asked its executives to delay a maintenance period so Iranians could use the service to communicate.

Whether or not Iran was the reason or just the tipping point, Twitter grew up.

Facebook may have grown, but Twitter is evolving. A recent statistic being thrown around the World Wide Web says that 69% of adults “didn’t know enough about Twitter to comment on the service.” That’s being translated as: More than two-thirds of adults don’t know what Twitter is. And while that deduction may be a bit of a stretch, the fact is that Twitter still has a lot of room to grow. 

As Facebook experiences a siege of college students’ adult parents, aunts, and professors, Twitter remains a bastion in social media for the users that saved it from anonymity and continue to make it tick. Twitter may be one of the best examples of crowdsourcing, because each tweet has decided what to make of it.

So, while Twitter might have to accept Ashton and Britney as unofficial spokespeople, it has other notches in its belt to be proud of. And a slick new homepage to highlight how far it has come. It’s a lot to ask, but sign out for a moment and give it a glance.