Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Because People Want To Know...

I happened upon an ABCNews story about Twitter that featured such luminaries as George Stephanopoulos and MC Hammer. I've got no idea how to post the damn thing in here, so I'll just link out to it: John Berman catches up with MC Hammer about Twitter. John Berman (@abcdude) gave a pretty good rundown of Twitter, although I again got the feeling that microblogging was some sort of funny joke.

Still, it got me to thinking. Mashable's recent-ish article about Twitter's growth is enough to make one's head spin. 752%? That's insance, but even with ~6 million users, the distinction between "user" and "USER" should be clear to anyone who has spent a few months tweeting. My curiosity is this: What is the "saturation point" for Twitter, i.e. when does it become normalized in much the same way that searching with Google or finding friends on Facebook has become blasé?

Is it going to be 15 million in the US? 40 million worldwide? When does Twitter use become so commonplace that we take it as a sine qua non of our online experience?