Hot Topic: Twitter is being outdone by a Twitter Ecosystem

Foreword: USBs, CDRs, Torrents — Oh My!
I have to state from the outset of this enterprise that I do not download the music. I buy a fair amount of it and the rest finds its way to me. I am what you might know as a P2P file sharer and I don’t like the word torrent. It sounds cold, and with a chance of flurries. The peers to this peer are my friends. They don’t seem averse to the torrent, and they are just doing what any 20, 30, 40 (50?) year old should be doing digitally: compile, stockpile and file a personal library of music and videos. In some cases, music videos. In 30 years, I imagine it will be a general enjoyment among adults, like a moment of leisure along the lines of “checking out the view.”

This knack for securing the goods through friends and file transfers, USB keys and CDs, was great before I discovered the “Safely Remove Hardware” option. Now it’s safer.

Hot Topic: The Twitter Ecosystem
I have a direct interest in file sharing, because in our digital age, word of mouth has many avenues from which to be spread, some more primarily used than others. Now, though, it seems those secondary avenues are merging and being utilized more than the traditionally popular applications. This goes beyond a Twitter post collaborating or functioning through Facebook , or vice versa. This is about the organized and seamless adaptation to higher communicative value. In the same way iPod supplies OS upgrades, new  applications made compatible with one another become an inherited ability of the mass. Naturally, a strong network of applications maintainig one another’s popularity, will produce a notably different type of synergy.

I understand examples of traditional synergy (two forces working together at the same time) in the media to be most present in broadcast initiatives. Disney had bought Capital Cities/ABC no sooner than Steve Urkel and the Winslows were vacationing at Magic Kingdom on ABC’s Family Matters.

On the internet, though, the collaboration between social media platforms goes beyond entertainment and product placement. It doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance at all to what synergy meant in the 90s. Now that applications like Twitter have changed the way we communicate (and are expected to communicate), they are being utilized to disseminate streamed content to other users. Much like a feed on Twitter (e.g. #humberpr, #musicmonday, #help haiti), media is easily accessible to a network of users all connected by their collective interests. If you’re registered, then your favourite artist’s music is easily accessible from these platforms, which themselves are becoming more popular than their originators.

Swift.fm and Twitter
One of the earliest contacts I’ve followed on Twitter, @questlove’s swift.fm tweets started to pile up and overflow out of my Favourites file. A restriction of the media I most commonly use (my iTouch) is that it can’t stream some video and audio formats. This is why I save tweets as Favourites and review them when it’s more convenient.
Unbeknownst to me, once you are registered on swift.fm with your Twitter information, tweeting takes a back seat to searching and uploading music regularly. For a P2P enthusiast like myself,it feels as though this is the next best way to communicate while sharing the art I follow as inspiring, impressive, or definitive. With Swift.fm, there is still the option to simply tweet, re-tweet and reply to other posts from Swift users, but all while listening to the selected music of those you follow on Twitter (and now on swift.fm).

Below is a screen shot of my first @swiftfm post, inadvertantly capturing the attention of the swift.fm Twitter admin.

Inside the Ecosystem:
The top media/information applications such Facebook and Google make up part of the Twitter Ecosystem, as well as some other of John Borthwick’s business interests. Borthwick, co-founder of Betaworks, the parent company to bit.ly, twitterfeed, tweetdeck, chartbeat, and many other notable web applications first reported this trend in his blog.

Borthwick also lists some early 2010 numbers in terms of high Twitter usage. So far, the number of twitterfeeds which the lines of communication reach are exponentially higher than that of publisher lines. People are more often contributing tweets from platforms other than twitter.com (e.g. Tweetdeck, Twitterfon, Echofon and Swift.fm. Fred Wilson chipped in from his blog:

“You can talk about Twitter.com and then you can talk about the Twitter ecosystem. One is a web site. The other is a fundamental part of the Internet infrastructure. And the latter is 3-5x bigger than the former and is likely to grow larger” (http://bit.ly/6DsWgh)

Perhaps for me, this means my days of USB hoarding of torrent file movies and music are nearly over. Things change so fast. Perhaps these early modulations and add-ons to the realm of the Twitterverse are only a brief indication of what our technologies are capable of. If so, what does this mean for the recording industry, which has been struggling to adapt to such file sharing advancements for over a decade now? Should this shift in the use of social media concern us as users or consumers?

Below is a comparison between Twitter.com usage and Twitter(.com + ecosystem). For a break down of the bit usage of the applications making up the ecosystem, click here.

Conclusion
As of now, the opportunity to tweet from other sites and applications within the Twitter Ecosystem is like the “preferred client” treatment on an airplane – I feel spoiled by this luxury. But, with time, this complimentary backrub will be more like a hot towel for our faces. We are much obliged for the frills of life, but we end up coming to expect such prompt and convenient service.