If it's not Ashton Kutcher threatening to take a "Twitter hiatus" over a proposed Twitter television show making the headlines, then it's his wife, Demi Moore, showing us her dentistry, Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross tweeting their every thought, or Kirstie Alley and Lily Allen posting updates on their love - or otherwise - of Susan Boyle. If there is anyone left who hasn't heard of Twitter, it won't be because of lack of celebrity endorsement or media coverage.
In the last year coverage of the microblogging service has soared - LexisNexis counted more than 3,000 news stories mentioning Twitter in a five-day period in April, according to a recent article by Paul Farhi in the American Journalism Review, while a Google search returns up to 500m mentions - and the site's number of users has apparently risen with it. A report by TechCrunch found the site's UK internet traffic had increased by 974% during the last year.
And it isn't just newspapers who love a new media trend. The publishing world, which only a few years ago was desperately trying to turn popular blogs into bestselling books, is monitoring the recent spate of Twitter novels - ongoing slices of life in 140-character bites.
What's the truth behind the hype? After all, a recent US study by Nielsen showed that while user numbers are growing, "60% of people end up abandoning the service after a month". Is Twitter just another case of the mainstream media getting over-excited about social media? So common is this trend that the community has come up with the term Jason - Just Another Social Network.
"Twitter is definitely an important tool but it's also important to note how fast this technology can change," says Charlie Beckett, director of the media thinktank Polis. "In five years' time, sites such as Twitter or Facebook may not exist at all - something else will have replaced them."
Facebook is still the social media king - although many articles now hail Twitter as pretender to that throne, regardless of the fact that the competitors offer very different services, and are often used in tandem. Facebook was also the site that newspapers and broadcasters spent most of 2007 and 2008 being excited about.
Before that, attention focused on MySpace, sold to News Corp in 2005 for £365bn; it now appears to be in freefall, with recent reports suggesting that page views are declining by as much as 0.5% a week. But the media's fixation with the latest digital trend is not just about hype, Beckett says. "These sort of stories are one way in which the mainstream media is attempting to understand how this new technology works. There is no doubt that social networking is changing journalism."
Last week, in fact, the New York Times, that most staid of US newspapers, finally surrendered to technology's advances and appointed a social media editor, Jennifer Preston, to concentrate "full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms". The appointment has been welcomed by many in the online community - although critics note that Preston does not come from a social media background: "It didn't help that [she] protected her Twitter updates until after the news broke," noted mashable.com's Ben Parr.
Mike Masnick, editor of the technology blog, Techdirt, says he is reserving judgment on the NYT appointment. "There's something of an internal struggle going on there between the old guard and their technology people who are often very good and very forward-thinking. I did think it was odd that the person appointed as social media editor was not that prolific in the world which she will be working in but I'm an optimist at heart - I believe that traditional media forms like newspapers will end up working with newer media forms to their mutual benefit and success."
Not everyone is as convinced that newspapers are so altruistic. "The mainstream media struggles to understand that Twitter is, at heart, a communication tool," says Andrew Gregson, founder of the real-time web platform media140.com.
And it remains true that there is something of a love/hate relationship between the mainstream media and social media. On one hand, newspapers are increasingly desperate not to be left behind in these fast-changing times, yet at the same time that very desperation can see them grasping at what seems shiny and new, only to see its essence slip through their fingers; as was proved by the Telegraph's aborted attempt to open its budget coverage to Twitter - only to find it disintegrating in a stream of abuse and random tweets.
"Certainly, mainstream journalists are often torn where new technology is concerned," says Masnick. "It's easy to jump in feet first and say that every new social media site is the next big thing, because if you get it wrong then it doesn't matter because the next big thing has replaced it, and you can talk that up."
As for books, it seems hard to imagine how Twitter novels can work - can you get the same enjoyment from an online serial as from a completed novel? "I think as technology it's still a little ahead of its time," admits Nick Belardes, whose witty workplace novel Small Places has attracted a growing following on the site. "In Japan they have keitai shousetsu or cellphone novels that people are making money off, and obviously that hasn't happened with Twitter yet. Things are changing and I think that the idea of the Twitter book will change along with that."
It's arguable that the Twitter book, with its brief chapters and frequent use of cliffhangers, is not that far removed from the 19th-century serialised novel. Yet for all the enthusiasm surrounding the new technology, all the stories and the hype, all the trends and the tweets, it is still the case that we have some way to go before fully embracing this new world.
"People always point to the Sichuan province earthquake as a great example of how Twitter broke the news before the mainstream media but at the end of the day that still didn't stop the Chinese government cracking down on bloggers, and on Twitter itself soon afterwards," says Beckett. "We are definitely evolving towards a new form of networked journalism but there's some way to go still."
* Social networking
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/01/twitter-social-news-media
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