I believe the Millennials who have not converted over already will actually find microblogging very useful in the near future. The network effect still needs to kick in for these services but it’s well on the way. Groups, organizations, news outlets, companies are all creating Twitter names and are starting to generate message streams. As the Millennials develop their unique expertise or they work for a company whose products and services they want to promote, microblogging will be the way of choice to reach a large group of people quickly and easily. Even if the same people read the same message on a social network, the context is completely different and the message will not be effective. This is the key point I think most people miss. It’s not about the social networks adding a stream up status updates and suddenly they are just the same as a microblogging site. Why would I expect the place where friends share pictures and where they are going for dinner to have messages about a new product I should check out or where I should go look for some authoritative information that may help me in my job?

Social Networks and Microblogging are very different services, have very different user demographics and users use them for very different purposes. Tweetdeck is a great way to see this because it allows you to very easily see Facebook friend status feeds and Twitter update feeds side by side so we can see how very different they are. In One Place I mostly see things like where people are, what they are doing, who they are seeing and what they like. Great stuff when I have my social networking hat on. In the other, I see blogs I must go read, lectures I might want to listen to, new products to check out and lots about good causes I might consider helping. Also great stuff when I want to hear what my friends, whose judgement I depend on to cut through the market chatter, think I might get a lot of benefit from.