Twitter co-founder Evan Williams was on Charlie Rose last Friday. In the clip above, he predicts that Twitter will be something “that normal people do” within five years. He compares Twitter to the early days of blogging (another topic he knows something about, having been the founder of what became Blogger). When blogging started, most people didn’t get it and it seemed like a huge waste of time that only appealed to narcissists. Twitter gets a lot of the same criticisms, yet somehow more and more people find it a valuable mode of communication.
Hopefully, it won’t take five years for Twitter to seem normal.
In the meantime, normal people are using Facebook at a rate of 175 million every 30 days.
LOL Facebook? Yawn… wasn’t that like big in college or something? Zuck fails inside of 3 years. The valuation is tanking and unless they actually launch something the masses like, it’s lights out and the fancy new office plex get’s leased to the Twitter crew.
Stop hating and join your recent FB friends who abandoned the tired platform to get into the new times over at Twitter.
The real reason why Twitter said no to Facebook’s take over? Ev didn’t want to report to that doucebag Zuck.
@Microserf: Yep, from the alleged $15B evaluation to $3.6B by their own estimate, and sinking. I doubt it’ll fail, but there’s going to be serious difficulty for them to make anywhere near the profit required to support that evaluation.
@Jeff Kameron: LOL, you retard. Just because you don’t have a life and need ‘followers’ and to ‘follow’ others means squat about large scale adoption.
For that $15b valuation- I suppose Microsoft got all of Facebook’s display advertising thrown in as a goodwill freebie? No value there…
#sigh#
I don’t see Facebook going anywhere anytime soon. It’s far more popular now than it was when you were “back in college”. Back then, only students were allowed to join..
Imagine following 100 people…say this…
—–
8:30 … just finished my bowl of wheaties
9:30 … wheaties kicked in … hitting the can.
10:45 … just got though a boring board meeting.
12:00 … off to the gym during lunch.
4:00 … in traffic on the highway.
8:00 … getting ready to watch American Idol
10:00 … off to bed…ready to twitter the same bullshit tomorrow…tune in.
—
waste of time
I just unfollowed you on twitter for useless garbage.
Agreed. Total waste of time and not nearly as entertaining as other crap on the internet, like http://www.anonboard.com for instance.
The great thing about Twitter is the ability to CHOOSE who you follow. If the updates are inane babble then stop following them.
Twitter is as good as you want it to be, of course that does mean you have to actually give it a chance and not moan just because your group of friends post garbage!
There’s no reason you can’t posts better tweets
Sometimes I wish blog comments had “unfollow” and “block” buttons..
Agree.
Twitter is a darling for narcissistic individuals who think that others actually care about what they do. For 1% of them this is true. The other 99% are just fooling themselves.
Normal people with normal common sense will not waste their time on this BS.
twitter *can* be used as a news medium too, although it was not really created for that. there are other similar tools specifically designed for news like http://www.popdigs.com/
I am a ‘normal’ 52 year old female professional and I use twitter. What the heck is ‘normal’ anyway? Nothing narcisistic about my use of this networking tool…I find great ideas for teaching and technology here.
and what would you expect? The founder of a company saying that in five years only retards and/or geeks and/or ego-trippers will be using his product?
Nice to know us Twitter users won’t be considered normal people for another 5 years. Thanks Ev.
Or maybe in 5 years we will be normal
i guess folks using it now arent normal . bad choice of words
Wow, that was a very boring clip!
ditto
Sounds like he has no idea what he’s doing, he’s talking like a horrible salesman.
blogger+twitter=respect
but you’d thinkhe could have
this question with a snappy
140 character response
hopefully twit will expand and become a real social network. that is there only hope. even then there abiltity to gain traction against established players will be very difficult. they do not have a strategic personalized offering great enough to unseat the established social players. im not seeing the structured user engagement platform required to make twit a primary gateway channel for social interaction. replication of their product is easy and im sure established players will offer a sms twit system any day now. maybe they could become the skype of text messaging.
Best of Skill to Twidder
Love the vator pitch!!
unbelievable, how much drivel comes from locator, i think u are actually mad
In 5 years people will be moved onto the next thing…
Know one will care about twitter
Or twitter will have gone bust
The problem is twitter has become a spam machine. It will be so overrun with ads it will be like myspace in 5 years.
So true. he is speaking to the VCs I guess. How quickly he forgot the fcucking economy tanked. Does he have a clue what will be unleashed in 3 months time or 6 months time could make twitter look like bird poop?
What, I’m not normal? Excuse me while I throw my arms in the air and run around like I just don’t care – whoop whoop…!…
I use twitter, I am normal. Does he think i am a freak?
What do you mean “seemed like a huge waste of time that only appealed to narcissists”?
In 5 years, normal people will be allowed to take the bus with current Twitter users……
Even now “normal people” don’t blog.
Right — normal people do not blog today.
Exactly right! Normal people today DON’T blog.
Normal people don’t know how to right click-open in new tab, use an FTP program, code in PHP, install an OS, or sync their Thunderbird and Gmail contact lists. They don’t have a Disqus account and couldn’t tell you what RSS stands for, much less regularly use a feed reader. This, despite being college graduates with professional jobs that use computers regularly.
We’re a VERY SMALL subset of the population.
I was watching ESPN today and they mentioned twitter like 10 times in the span of 5 minutes. I think it will be quicker, maybe 2-3 years.
In five years time Twitter will be on round Z of funding, a monster $1bn, and will still have no revenue model.
Aw, how can you say so? Every third TechCrunch posting is about Twitter…are you saying that Arrington is a hack who never inquires whether a company can make a profit with their circlejerk tech? I thought he was a ‘journalist’.
http://twitpic.com/1faqu/full
this is what normal people think of twitter and facebook
That was the funniest pic I’ve seen this year so far! Thanks!
Twitter could become much more mainstream in the next couple of years if the right Company buys it out.
And the Company that should seriously consider buying Twitter is News International, especially as Twitter has a huge value in breaking news – either from Citizen Journalists or from Big Celebrities.
Imagine Major Twitter Tweets being read out Live either on Fox News in the USA or Sky News in the UK.
Imagine even if Twitter was around during 9/11.
There is always a huge competitive battle with News Networks to be the first in Breaking News.
I strongly believe that in the near future Twitter would become a ‘killer app’ for one of the major News Networks
I give it 18 months before my mom starts tweeting.
Your mom’s a whore, Ben. Why did you have to drag your ugly momma into this?
i need a 400 oz. coffee after watching this snoozefest.
I still hate IM. Twitter ain’t going nowhere fast with me.
I’m sure Ev knows a lot better than I do, but I don’t think it’ll take 5 years to cross the chasm =)
People are getting lazier and their attention spans are getting shorter – what’s better for that than 140 characters?
@nams
PS I’m surprised no one else left their Twitter handle in their comment. Funny.
The question is will twitter suck when normal people start using it? — Usenet newsgroups were great until AOL opened them up to normal people in 1993. Pretty quickly after that, newsgroups sucked.
With newsgroups you can’t select what you see, with Twitter you don’t have to follow any of the ‘normal’ people so what you see won’t change.
Of course you can select what you see in newsgroups. You can unsubscribe groups, and since ancient times, people had kill files and filters.
If you need to search for say, the solution to a technical problem, or discussion of a physics paper, you’re far more likely to find useful information on USENET/dejanews/Google Groups than searching Twitter.
There is something to be said about communication channels which don’t have 140 character limits.
Spoken like a guy who came online with AOL.
However, the power users of twitter have to deal with the crap of the masses. If someone has 100,000 people following them and they make a statement that invokes a reply from even 1% of their followers, the pile of feces they’ll need to either wade through or ignore will be immense. I could see that scaring a lot of content creators away.
There’s no getting around it. As Twitter becomes popular, there will be issues to deal with.
Well “normal people” are already using Twitter. It was mentioned on a talk show down here in Australia and now loads of my non-geeky friends are getting into it.
That’s because Australians are conformist dickheads.
Please tell me what pain Twitter solves?
You mean, normal like Britney?
Calm down, crew. Evan meant normal, meaning late adopters.
Be proud that you’re early adopters and that the majority needs to be led into a new paradigm shift.
I do agree that the focus needs to move from narcissistic focus to sharing common interests. Today, an active twitter is bombarded with messages, from spam to lifestreaming blips, 1% of which is meaningful. It’s like year 2000 email before spam filters took control. Of course, spam filters also annoy with constant false spam filtering.
Our sites, and others will follow, shift the focus from self to the subject. For example, we’ve prepped for March Madness with pages for each team. This allows fans to group and cheer their team, and befriend themselves in the process.
Evan understands that the impact of Twitter is greater than originally envisioned. In 5 years, there will be a lot of change. The question is whether you will lead or follow?
Somebody paid attention in class today…
twitter, again, yawn
I guess what he really wanted to say is that smart people, the really smart ones, the super super smart one are not normal.
Thus in 5 years all the morons, the retards, the idiots aka the masses/normal monkey brain will be using Twitter
I predict: twitter will not last 5 years.
Don’t quit your day job.
I won’t
If you just knew what it was 
back in ur cage, ev…
140 character conversations piquantly registered on a simple interface by 1.8 hundred million people who can’t resist pimping the poop out of their chaotic MySpace pages laden with massive amounts of irrelevant text?
Sorry, this is one vision I don’t see passing Go.
Twitter will continue to be a hefty niche product for as long as it is viable.
For all the folks who keep beaking about spam on twitter — you see tweets only from the people you follow. If you don’t follow a spammer, they CAN’T spam you. Pretty simple, right? Think RSS vs email.
Caveats:
* spam in search (this will get better with filters)
* direct message spam, where you follow someone and they send you their Get My Free Ebook! crap. You can unfollow these people, and/or even block them. There are also opt-out methods like http://twitter.com/optmeout
@dragushan
So,…Twitter takes another 35 million in funding. Okay… What does this mean? Well, simply put, it means that Twitter loses more control in the company and advertisers will begin to flock more and more to the Twitter crowd (no pun intended).
What Twitter fails to do is one big thing; provide relevance. To most of us, Twitter is nothing more than a status update, as shown on popular social networks (i.e., Facebook, etc…). What is the ULTRA compelling Value Add with this new infusion of capital? Do I get to share what I’m doing right now and tell you what I’m doing later?
The future of the web is about relevance. It’s about capitalizing on niche markets and creating a niche within a niche. Give people a solution to a problem instead of a problem to a solution. Who knows…maybe one is being developed as we speak.
twitter isn’t about letting everyone know how your crap was. The value of the service is breaking news, insight, traffic generation and Shock and AWE – some actually use it to network.
If you find the service useless delete your account. You sound like a boring follow anyways.
And as such it’s not going to grow much more than the self obsessed dipshit classes, nor will it be able to make money off its users.
Nobody can match my twitter skills.. don’t even try!
Test
Gee, he’s a lot dumber than I expected. Gives me hope.
Normal people on Twitter in 5 years? I love Twitter and I’m on it daily (link above), but I’d be surprised if “normal people” are even using desktop computers like they are now in 5 years. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t even need to use a keyboard in the 5 years.
Sure, Twitter will evolve into something even cooler over the next 6-12 months and might quadruple in size in 18 months, but we could easily see 3 or 4 competitive companies take Twitter’s place in 5 years.
I’ll stick to Facebook for now.
It is true it has taken some time to accept blogging ,like that people will also addict to twitter in the future,for sure.
Why do people have so much trouble with the concept that you only get updates from people you choose and you can only get DMs from people you are following?
Thus far I have had no requests to be a zombie and for that alone Twitter stays close to my heart
“so far”
SMS (texting) became a hughe success as:
- it was less expensive than calling
- it is person to person message
- requires in most cases a reply
Twitter is:
- not less expensive than a service everybody uses.
- not person to person – but broadcast to followers.
- hardly any conversation is started.
Twitter seems to become more and more a place where people try to get attention for themselves or their business: ego-marketing?
I say 3 to 4 years. FB started in 04 and in 08 everyone and their mom & dad are using it!
Given the trend of past bubble services, I’d be surprised if FB and Twitter survive five more years. On the other hand, siloed proprietary AOL IM/Yahoo IM/MSN have survived a lot longer.
It will be just like Myspace after 5 years. Usage will go down 40% and people like us will only use it once a month because a better application will be like the twitter of today and Myspace of yesterday..
‘Normal people will use Twitter in 5 years’ he he
So does he mean that all the current users of Twitter are insane? If that is the case, then maybe after 5 years we might have another insane app for the current insane public and the normal people will use Twitter then… that sounds stupid!
Every one who actively uploads to you tube (or similar video publishing sites,) has their own personal website or blog could be using twitter in 5 years.
How many normal people out there can set up a blog (on blogger or similar) on their own much less twitter?
It could be possible that the average cell phone in 5 years could provide an easier to use tweet publishing and (much more importantly) an easier to use tweet reading experience without having to visit twitter.com similar to how tweetdeck (through the desktop) and twitterfox (through the browser) currently do.
Yes, but, I will have to launch several tactical nukes far into the upper atmosphere and release the starving fleas of millions of camels upon civilization if society continues to plummet into the inverted vortex of hell by utilizing a fricking cell phone for everything except pooping.
Normal people already started using it. and after 5years?? Do that mean internet technology will be stopped at 2009? So we can’t predict like this.
In five years, Twitter will be gone.
… And I will laugh.
Never understood why people are using Twitter.
Don’t see a sense in following someone just to know what s/he is doing right now.
Sounds like all the idiots who are watching Big Brother because they don’t have a life.
For companies it might be interesting marketing. But for individuals… well.. I just can’t get it…
And comparing Twitter to Facebook is more than stupid. Facebook is a Social Network. People put up their profiles cause they’re… well horny and want to meet some high school girl…
But serious, anyone able to explain what’s so special with Twitter? Why should I care that Mr. Arrington (just an example) gave the taxi driver 20 bucks tip or that John, the pizza delivery guy, just delivered 50 pizza to the Google Mansion?
Anyone.. ?
>Don’t see a sense in following someone just to know what s/he is doing right now.
That statement betrays both a poverty of imagination and an indolent curiosity. I don’t follow people to find out what they are “doing right now”. I follow people to find out where they are directing their attention. I’ve found more useful content through links posted to Twitter than through RSS, search, or social bookmarking. And timely, too.
People who only post their personal trivia and never link to useful content don’t get followed very long. But there are plenty of generous intellects out there who just want to share their joy in discovering new or at least novel information. Many of them are acknowledged thought leaders, others are simply astute and accretive by nature. Too bad you don’t know any.
Not sure what ev meant by “normal”, but I expect it’ll turn out to be people like Marco, who, fifteen years ago, could only see the web as a bunch of vanity pages.
People who can only see the superficial aspects of something they don’t understand illuminate their own inability to think creatively. At Wal-Mart, they’re called “customers”. On the web, they’re just exudate.
–Ax
“When blogging started, most people didn’t get it and it seemed like a huge waste of time that only appealed to narcissists. Twitter gets a lot of the same criticisms”
Hey people – news flash here – for the vast majority it IS a time waster and egotistical. At best, it could be called a “hobby” like the guy who makes a ship in a bottle or the woman who collects porcelain pigs. Unless you are making money from doing it, it is exactly that.
And please, unless you are a celebrity or have something VERY interesting to say, don’t twitter. I’d rather hear the homeless crazy person down my street spout nonsense that read your inane commentary.
I dont get why somebody who uses Facebook (Everybody?) would use Twitter. Facebook has his own Twitter clone (status msg) and everybody use it right now. Why in 5 years people will stop using Facebook to update his status and start using Twitter instead?
5 years is like eternity in Internet.
(5years ago Skype was the hype.)
This whole TWITTER thing is becoming annoying
Twitter this twitter that give it a rest , Your not getting popular if you say you twitter.
twitter , twitter , twitter, twitter, twitter, twit.
Oh and another thing smoking is addictive right then what would happen if twitter addicts lose there means to twitter yeah,
He I cant twitter anymore that I went out pooping, Oh darn I forgot to twitter that my favorite show started, I’m so sad I have to twitter I broke up with my girlfriend to let know I’m single again boohoo.
Get a life.