I have a deep and abiding sense of deja vu.  I’ve been here before. Today, it’s Twitter; in 1994, it was the Web.

It was 1994 and you were starting to see www on Coke cans, in Super Bowl ads, on commercials, on billboards.  Newspaper stories interviewed the early adopters.  Many scoffed at the idea that this thing called the World Wide Web would change our lives.  Cartoonists started mentioning it in their daily panels.  Jokes started to circulate, admittedly not at the speed they do today.  Working for an enterprise software firm, we had internal discussions about websites, including assessing the “rogue” sites put up by someone in the development department.  One of our competitive intelligence guys started buttonholing anyone who would listen with a talk about the wave of the future.

I see the difference between Twitter and the World Wide Web — one an infrastructure, the other an application but the adoption curve, the sense of TNBT and the place in today’s culture feel eerily familiar.

I’ve heard 3.5 million tossed around as the number of Twitter users — that number might be outdated by now.  It’s still small — a tip of the iceberg in terms of Internet population.

But what if this adoption path continues its trajectory?