Imagine aliens have just arrived on earth from Mars in Dubbo, NSW. A small crowd gathers to welcome our intergalactic visitors and waits for them to speak. There first question, having monitored human communications for thousands of years, would probably be this:
"What is Twitter?"
The crowd huddles to determine the best response. Twitter fanboys would take the company line and scream "a micro-blogging service that lets you tell others what you are doing", but this would be shot down by the tech-heads who would be more purist and state "it's a source of personal news from anyone anywhere". Young teens would rebut not all tweets are news-based or reflective of current events, and that "the SMS of the internet" is a better answer.
As the tension grew and the debate heated up, an elderly woman would almost always be certain to chime in with the classic "it's a pointless form of time-wasting" in a stereotypical, grumpy-old-woman way...
And I would agree.
Now, before you start typing out hate mail, know that what I'm talking about here is the transition of Twitter from a source of personal interest to a form of personal expression. Twitter is now evolving into a place of entertainment, not news or information (although these are still very important.
Take a look at the trend data for Twitter in 2010 and you quickly see hashtags and entertainment now make 70% of Twitter's trend categories over sport, news, business and other topics. This rise in entertainment and hashtagging (hashtagging rose over 400% since 2009) suggests that users of Twitter are more focused on using the platform as a means of self-entertainment rather than as a place for news and information (that said, I should point out these services have been squeezed, not replaced, by the rise in hashtagging popularity).
In fact, Twitter is more in common with social gaming these days than a news service. If you're willing to imagine an online word game, where players are given a topic or event or question and the aim is to get as many people reading your response to that question as possible, then we can suddenly view Twitter in a whole new way. The winners of this game will have broad-reaching wit and rhetoric as skills, and approach answers to questions in a remarkable and interesting fashion.
This is what we see evolving with Twitter. It is World of Warcraft in text format; a world-wide multiplayer game where everyone wants their response read and retweeted to feel that same satisfaction that comes from collecting a star in Super Mario World or killing a green pig in Angry Birds.
Hashtagging (such as #itsasmelbourneas or #mymotheralwayssaid) is the new entertainment arm of twitter, and it's on the rise. It is pointless and useless like all good entertainment, and it has a built-in reward system (retweets) and rules (140 characters only!) like any good game. At its core, the Twitter community is becoming more adept at entertaining each other and themselves, rather than relying on external sources of entertainment from brands and businesses to drive interest.
For brands, much like aliens, the critical factor is understanding what Twitter is in action, not what it is in theory, and above all, joining the game.
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