We can see how much public space matters in the furore over what might seem at first to be a relatively small change to the way Twitter operates. The micro-blogging service may be a minority occupation and its attractions may be a mystery to the vast majority of internet users, but the hype does not diminish its importance as a bellwether for the future development of social media.
A fascinating must-read post for social media geeks from my British friend Bill Thompson, who goes into some depth on a subject I've merely been chatting about recently - the fact that Twitter has been largely invented by its users and is, in large part, a public space worthy of protection. Bill focuses in on the humble "retweet" and Twitter's corporate move to take control over its crowd-sourced feature. It'll be really interesting to see how that crowd reacts when Twitter - the company - starts in 2010 to try and extract money from Twitter, the community. I suspect that today's massive Project Red/World AIDS Day marketing campaign on Twitter is the kind of thing we'll see a lot more of. Will it work, or will the Twitter crowd merely route around the advertising messaging?
