For many the NewTwitter is about a new user experience. Or Twitter eating its client partners for lunch while adding content partners. But for me NewTwitter can be summed up in this slide:
You've probably seen a lot of charts labled Hockey Stick Growth, but this actually is one. But the good folks at Twitter probably saw something happening about six months back -- the potential for Tweets per day to level out. As Ev tweeted in his presentation:
You don’t need to tweet to get value from Twitter any more than you need to make a web page to use the web via web
Six months from now they probably want to show another hockey stick, with today as the inflection point, and it will plot visits or views again. This is what they call mainstreaming. What's impressive is how Twitter pulled together their most significant upgrade. And if the goal was expressed in numbers it would be for mainstream growth.
But a word of caution. Mainstreaming was the thing that Yahoo thought they did best, the core of their initial achievement. But as 2.0 came along the Mainstreaming legacy groups, culture and processes kept them from adapting. If Twitter succeeds, they need to be wary of the kind of success that can come from growth. And I hope they do, because this is still just the beginning.
P.S.: This post is really just about the obvious, while I'm waiting to actually play with it.
