Has Twitter hit the tipping point?  That depends on how you define the tipping point.  In any case there’s no question that Twitter is entering the mainstream consciousness.  The key question is where will Twitter go from here?

Twitter is riding the now famous hype curve, but will it flame out or will it persist?  We knew Google had really arrived when people started using it as a verb.  Facebook hit the major growth phase last year and now Facebooking is an accepted verb. 

Estimates of Twitter visitor traffic grew by 10 to 15 x in 2008.  Now everywhere i look there is a new article being written about Twitter.  And Twittering or it’s alternate verb form of ‘Tweeting’ is becoming commonplace.

But what does the future hold?  It’s hard to say, Twitter is making a lot of good moves, but the Twitter is still not a well-defined or well-understood phenomenon even for its founders.  They are just following their instincts.  Every day new uses and unexpected benefits from using Twitter are being discovered. 

I’m very optimistic though.  Let me explain why. 

1) A Solid Open API - Twitter has a solid API that enables lots of interesting and creative ideas to be created.  This has already generated over 100 Twitter-based services and applications.  Enabling creativitiy is crucial and it’s why new applications for Twitter keep surfacing.

2) Eco Conscious - No, not that eco.  I’m talking about being eco-system friendly.  This is something traditional business people don’t understand. This is a deep subject so I’ll write a separate post on the value of eco-systems and how sharing the pie creates a much bigger and better pie.  Most dominant companies in the past got that way by controlling their whole market to an extreme.  Think monopolies.  Today we know better.  Fostering an eco-system helps everyone.  Twitter seems to get this fundamental fact of innovative growth.

3) Creative Openness - The team at Twitter has shown strong instincts which are needed to maximize the potential of something so revolutionary.  There is no roadmap for this uncharted territory.  What you need is flexibility and good instincts.  So far Twitter has evolved far beyond what the founders thought it was in the beginning.  This creative openness will be essential to navigating the uncharted frontier which lies ahead.

4) Value - The old saying that ‘success breeds success’ is very true.  The success of Twitter so far, it’s rapid growth and adoption by individuals and businesses, is evidence of real value.  That value is likely to continue to expand as the creativity of hundreds or thousands of innovative organizations work to build on the foundation that Twitter has built.

Only time will tell for sure, but this snowball has all the signs of a truly revolutionary new medium.

For the hard-core ROI side of the story here is a great article from August 2008 that makes the case that there is no way Twitter can succeeed.  They make good points, but There are plenty of ‘exceptions that prove the rule’ in all fields.  YouTube got acquired before it ever made a dime.  I figured it for dead.  But Google wanted to be in the video market and Google Video was a failure compared to YouTube.