Is Apple now the defacto owner of the term “Tablet”

I did a quick study yesterday of the term “tablet” on Twitter. Although I managed to lose the data with one unfortanate click of the mouse (I accidentally clicked Shutdown in Vista rather than Sleep and this closed a Google Docs spreadsheet without having it saved. Ouch.), I remember quite well the basics of the trends.

This is what I did: I searched for the term “tablet” via search.twitter.com and then for the first 100+ tweets that appeared in the results I categorized for each how the term “tablet” was used. Was it referring to an Apple tablet? Or a pill? Or a stone tablet? Or a Nokia tablet? Or a Tablet PC? And so on.

I was curious. Just how are people using the term tablet today.

The trend was obvious. Non-Tablet PCs won. By a huge margin. In fact, for the first 100 tweets, there were only three references to Tablet PCs proper. Only three. The vast majority were either about a Nokia tablet, or an Apple tablet, or some other connected tablet. In the distance, there were a bunch of references to tablet peripherals, such as Wacom tablets, but like with Tablet PC, the numbers were small. Kind of leads to an interesting conclusion about the community value of pen-or-Wacom-based like devices doesn’t it? Very interesting that whether we’re talking Tablet PC with a capital ‘T’ or tablet as in Wacom tablet, the tweet volume was within the same magnitude.

What’s going on here? Well, one big factor I could see was that sites like Engadget were heavily influencing Twitter. There were lots of people retweeting Engadget stories or effectively restating Engadget’s headlines even if they weren’t explicitly pointing to Engadget itself. Lots. (As an aside: You can really see how Twitter can become an amplifier of whatever headline Engadget uses–regardless of whatever the content is. That’s an important thing for people to keep in mind that might want a product mentioned on Engadget. Your product might live or die by whatever the headline is.)

Now on this particular day, Nokia won the tweet count. That was mainly due to a new product announcement about a Nokia Internet tablet. However, even without a real tablet, Apple wasn’t far behind. I think the numbers were something like 36 for Nokia and 29 for Apple, but I might be off by a couple tweets.

This kind of reminds me of just before the iPhone came out. At the time everyone was calling it an iPhone, even though Apple wasn’t officially. After a couple months Apple got things straightened out, but clearly the community helped drive the usage of the iPhone name.

I wonder if the same thing is going on now. In other words, if Apple does release a “tablet,” even if it isn’t technically a tablet, will the affective and accepted definition of a tablet adjust? It’s a possibility.

Anyway, I’ll track sample some tweets next week to see if this trend continues.