Omnipresence

People can now live in an omnipresent way through micro-blogging and life-casting services. Taking a look at Twitter’s compete numbers, even if the numbers are not accurate, we see that the number of unique visitor to their organic site has almost doubled in the last 3 months.

Twitter’s simple capability of telling those who are “following” us what we are doing through web or mobile sms updates limited to 140 characters has enabled our generation to be omnipresent. This is not just a Twitter phenomena, as a host of other services are capitalizing on the insight that there is an insatiable desire to self market and to share with the world what one is doing. Furthermore, there is an equal insatiable desire to know what others are doing. I would contend that what drives most facebook users back to the site multiple times a day is to refresh their home page to get updates on what their friends are doing. Thus, although facebook has many other capabilities, it appears that the simple text based updates on what one is doing is the reason most come back to the site several times a day. Personally, I find myself refreshing my fb homepage on the web multiple times a day for this reason and on my iPhone while stuck at traffic lights while driving.

These sort of services that enable us to be omnipresent are being classified as micro-blogging or life-casting services. There is justin.tv which allows users to create channels and share with others anything that is on their mind via a webcam. There is tumblr and zannel which are a sort of multimedia twitter. I believe we are still at the infancy of the omnipresence insight and there is much room left for entrepreneurs to come up with novel ventures that will make the process of self marketing by sharing what we are doing easier and the consumption of the media we share richer.