Twitter and the Emergence of a New Market : How Twitter is Disrupting Market Exchanges Based Upon Price

Our interest in writing this article is to create a bridge between the scholarly and academic research on technological innovation and a private sector, for-profit business model that implements the ideas on small business innovation and entrepreneurship, primarily in metro regional economies. According to the theory of technology evolution outlined in Predicting Technology (Vass, 2007), new markets emerge in a time series of micro bifurcations in market demand. Much of what happens when a new market emerges is related to what consumers do when they see a new product for the first time. The consumer’s brain is furiously searching and sorting millions of images and patterns, trying to come up with something that looks like the new product. Some brains may be able to come up with images or memories of something that “fits” with the new image they are seeing. Twitter is a social media innovation that is a macro marketplace bifurcation. What you do in the market after you first Twitter will never be the same as what you did before you Tweeted for the first time. The images being sorted in your brain will never be the same. Twitter is a macro market bifurcation because it totally changes the dynamics of marketplace competition because it changes the currency of exchange. In other words, Twitter is creating a new marketplace and displacing the old marketplace of exchanges based upon money and prices. The older money exchange market was primarily based on the idea that consumers would try to find the lowest cost product that satisfied their needs. Twitter changes the currency of exchange. But, more significantly, because Twitter is based on a web 2.0 platform that allows for greatly expanded interactive marketplace exchanges, including e-commerce, it is also replacing the entire older market of bricks-and-mortar shopping centers