Making into the mainstream is the pot of gold at the end of the Web 2.0 social media rainbow. Some like Facebook and MySpace have made it based on shear volume and old media press basically saying that they were popular. Other social media entities like Twitter still seem to be sitting on the fence. While bloggers like Kara Swisher suggest that it still has a long way to go before it becomes mainstream others like myself believe that it is a lot closer to the mainstream.

I’ve been thinking about this since I last wrote about Twitter being mainstream and I wondered how without the same press that Facebook or MySpace it has reached that mainstream tipping point. While those two big social networks have benefited from both negative and positive press that has been piled on them Twitter has seemingly been gaining popularity while under the radar of mainstream press.

There is no denying that Twitter is gaining in popularity even among people who once thought that the idea of Twitter was stupid and pointless. When you look at the public timeline of Twitter you can see just how much it has progressed beyond being a tool used by tech bloggers. You see everything from politics to medical to casual conversations flowing by you as a growing number of people are using it as their main communication tool.

But an interesting thing appears to be happening with Twitter that made me think that it has unknowingly become an integral tool for people not normally associated with social media or even the web in general. Of course most of are now familar with the story about the US grad student in Egypt but as I pointed out in a post not long ago Twitter is becoming a tool that is increasingly being used by large agencies.

It has even gotten to the point that Twitter is now the place to be if you want to find out what the really breaking news is around the world. Whether it be a natural disaster, political results as they happen or having your plants tell you they need water Twitter is becoming an ever important way to get the information as it happens. When I have someone from the Red Cross telling me the comments of a post about Twitter that they are preparing to use Twitter I think Twitter has made it to the big time

At the American Red Cross, we’ve been experimenting with ways to use Twitter during disasters. We’ve been waiting for more than a year to roll out the @redcross channel to push information to people in a large-scale evacuation. We just haven’t had that kind of disaster yet.

As MG Siegler from ParisLemon said in a recent post:

The mainstream media is finally starting to understand what many of us have been saying for well over a year. As I said last April:

“…but for breaking news, Twitter is proving to be a force.”

So much of the focus has been on if Twitter and its mundane life updates can catch on in the mainstream, that people are looking right past some of its true potential, such as breaking news.

Even with all of Twitter’s stability problems the service has continued to prove to be an invaluable tool. It has accomplished this growth in an almost organic way by what could be considered electronic word of mouth. This natural growth is very similar to how Google managed to insinuate itself within our daily lives. Now Google has become an indispensable tool for a larger percentage of people who use the Internet and I can see the same thing happening with Twitter.

I don’t think that Twitter will ever need the press coverage like Facebook or MySpace needed in order to become known in the mainstream. Instead I think it successfully found the backdoor to mainstream popularity like Google did and as long as they can answer the stability and profitability questions Twitter will only continue to grow and without any help from the very mainstream it is becoming a part of.

Conversation Tags: Twitter, mainstream