Although you might still not be using Twitter, chances are that venture capital firm you hope to raise money from is. During a panel on "microblogging" at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on Wednesday, a group of high-tech analysts and consultants discussed how Twitter and a growing number of similar online services that let members publish brief updates on what they're up to have are making traditional blogs seem practically passé. The result: an ever shorter attention span on the part of tech-savvy business people who no longer want to devote an entire elevator ride (so 2007) to entertaining a single pitch.
Stowe Boyd, a consultant who sat on the panel, coined the term "escalator pitch" to convey an ultra-compressed way of doing business in which one person riding on the up escalator would meet another going down and exchange a key idea in the brief moment that their paths crossed. Boyd says he's used Twitter to solicit business pitches and has received a lot of good ideas squeezed into 140 characters, many which seemed to feed off other "tweets" in circulation. "It made it much more of a performance," he said, "not something happening in the smoky back room that is email."
Describing email as a smoky, back-room way of communicating sounds almost as odd as the term "traditional blogs." Yet, while some Internet users are just now taking to blogs, more forward-looking types are moving away from them, panelists said. Increasingly, the commentary on blogs that once took place in a comments section on the site is occurring off the site on places like Twitter. And while to the uninitiated the idea of sending and receiving constant bite-sized updates may sound strange, Boyd and the other panelists argued that when enough people take part in exchanges, the result is an enlightening, open discourse.
Judging by the large portion of hands that went up when the audience was asked whether they tweet (how long before that verb enters the vernacular, like "Google"?), there are many such conversations going on in this format. Increasingly, those conversations are likely to relate to business, said Boyd, who described how a group of Hollywood writers had used a micro-blogging site to publish their current projects and send out alerts when they were ready for new work. "As more and more peopel use these sites, the benefits for all users go up significantly," he said. -- Andrea Orr
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