Is Twitter a Gharial?

I was watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Animal Planet (takes me back...) while blogging and twittering - and finishing up World of Goo - and a thought occurred: is Twitter a gharial?

For those few readers who may not know, a gharial is a highly specialized crocodile that has evolved into a fishing machine. The gharial survived over the millennia by being heavily optimized for eating small fish. With a long, narrow snout "the reduced weight and water resistance of their lighter skull and very narrow jaw gives gharials the ability to catch rapidly moving fish, using a side-to-side snapping motion." The trade-off is that "gharials have sacrificed the great mechanical strength of the robust skull and jaw that most crocodiles and alligators have, and in consequence cannot prey on large creatures...." They've traded specialization for adaptability.

However, while they were once perfectly adapted to their environment, with changing ecosystems through the ages the gharial are now on the critically endangered list and only survive in the wild in a few areas in India. Wild Kingdom chronicled a heart-breaking episode where an early monsoon wiped out one of the few remaining nesting grounds for gharials, washing away dozens of eggs.

Twitter is having its moment. They are a gharial and the internet is presenting it with an bounty of small fish, many of whom were tired of competing with the bigger blog sharks and searched for easier waters. But Twitter is successful in great part by the discipline of its creators to focus on the simplicity of doing what it does best, while others have undulated and mutated, copied and careened. Twitter is highly specialized.

Yet the environment is changing, and the fish are growing. We are now seeing macro-micro-bloggers, from Britney Spears to Al Gore, and organizations small and large are wading into the waters as well. Meanwhile, other predatory species are waddling in from the riverbank. So the question is: is Twitter adaptable?

We've seen this before. The social media space already has a long line of hit services that grabbed the limelight and then gave way to new golden children: LiveJournal, Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, Friendster, MySpace, and some would argue that Twitter is taking the attention from the current darling, Facebook. And already some luminaries are suggesting that Twitter itself is peaking. All of these services continue on successfully, of course, but the conditions that brought them to prominence changed almost as rapidly as they materialized, and these services will have to adapt along with the environment.

Facebook has made notable, aggressive moves to evolve and, despite a fair amount of criticism for a number of its moves, it clearly possesses the strength and adaptability to make changes, learn from mistakes, and adjust. Twitter has only made the slightest adjustments to its product mix in the last few years - an approach that has served it well... so far. But we know that environments change and we will learn just how adaptable Twitter is, or even wants to be, in the coming months and quarters. Do they meddle with the specialization that has brought them this far? Or do they stay the course and risk others adapting better than they to the web's ever changing ecology?

I think Twitter is a phenomenal service and I admire the founders and management team tremendously. It will be fascinating to see how they approach this dilemma.