I can say with certainty that Twitter is aiming for the mainstream. They are trying to move past the early adopters and heavy tech users. Why do I say this? Well just a few hours ago Twitter has started to “educate” their users with word definitions for words such as “Widget”. They started showing these word definitions on the home page of users profiles with short “Simple Simon” types of descriptions.

A widget in the simplest of terms is a self contained mini-data delivery device for web site content. They allow content to be distributed to multiple sites in a compact size. In the case of Twitter it allows your latest tweets to be displayed on your website or blog by simply cutting and pasting a code snippet.

Here is an example of a live twitter widget. Put one on your site and users will see your latest tweets as well as number of followers.

Here is a short video interview where Jeremiah Owyang who is an analyst at Forrester Research asked me “what is a widget” about 18 months ago. We talk a bit about facebook, but the concepts fully apply.