BY THE WAY TWITTER IS SIX AS IT FACES PINTEREST

First Tweet

When it comes to business plans, in the last 12 months Twitter has been somewhat eclipsed with Facebook’s IPO. The questions about Twitter still remain the same as on its last birthday: Will it go public, will it be acquired by a giant such as Google, Apple or Microsoft, or will it simply keep growing?

As facebook prepares for its ground breaking $5b initial public offer, IPO, its cousin, twitter becomes a year older. The event actually was on march 21. For an idea that began as a tool for friends to broadcast updates from their lives via SMS, Twitter has come a very long way. Now at an impressive 140million users, the micro blogging network is steadily growing into the world’s source for fresh information about anything and everything. For many international news organizations, twitter is now the core element in their publishing strategy. These days almost every major item of news is first broken on twitter – from Osama bin Laden’s assassination to Tuface’s engagement to Annie Macaulay and the confounding Don Jazzy/D’banj divorce. Twitter may be growing in popularity because these piece of information come in 140 characters, max, which means they are a lot easier to digest. 

Aside from that twitter is a really cool concept. But being cool may turn out to be a drawback eventually because hipness is a fleeting quality. Remember Hi5 and MySpace used to be cool? That’s right, they are dead and gone. However, for Pinterest the new hot social thing coming from America (where else?), success is less about coolness and more about fun. Since the very understated phenomenon opened 2010, 4 years after twitter, the site has rocketed over 10.5 million users, according to data collected by Internet Marketing, Inc. put it in context: when twitter was 2years old, it has only three million accounts. And wait, this membership of Pinterest is still by invitation only. For the privileged few on the site, Pinterest is captivating because it is visual – members take images from anywhere to ‘Pin’ on their pages and their followers can add comments of or ‘rePin’ the images on their own pages. Okay I hope when or if Pinterest  finally opens its doors to the world, the experience won’t be pinful to twitter whose user may be lured away by something more fun. But who knows social media is full of surprises.