[Note: Before you comment on this, please note that it was written in March 2007. The 'celebs' may have changed, but I think the article is still valid, over two years later.]
If you haven’t heard of twitter then you’ve either been living on another planet for the past few months, or you’re the kind of person that has a life.Unfortunately, I’m neither of the above.
Twitter describes itself as “a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives”, but really the best description is a “micro-blogging” site.
You see, unlike a typical blog, twitter wants to know “What are you doing?” 24 hours a day. You have a text box with 140 characters, and the idea is that you give a running commentary of every moment of your life.All messages you send automatically appear on all your “friends’” pages, and all their messages appear on yours. Horrifying, isn’t it?
But it gets worse. The thing that makes twitter stand out is that all messages can be sent and received via your favourite instant messenger.. or on your mobile phone. So what you end up with is a service that’s half way between a blog and a “group instant messenger”.
So why is this so bad?
Well it’s partly down to the kind of people that are using the service. You see, twitter is very popular with the geek community on the West Coast, and has kind of spread out from there. So what you see on the site is a combination of techie messages, dot-com-geek-wannabes trying to get noticed and a whole load of stuff that’s so mundane it just makes you wonder why you didn’t spend the last ten minutes doing something constructive instead – like maybe shooting yourself in the head.
Call me old fashioned, but I really have no interest in the fact that Leo Laporte is eating his lunch, Cali Lewis is drinking a coffee with Splenda Flavor Blends, or even whose couch Kevin Rose happens to be trowing up on today.
You see, unless all your friends are on twitter the noise-to-signal ratio on the site is enough to make you want to go out and pull the legs of kittens to relieve the boredom.
And that’s why twitter will succeed.Because it only works if all your friends are on it, the only way to have any real fun is to invite them all. Then you can be the one inflicting the tedium on others! Yay!Now this ‘model’ has been used before – and what we ended up with was MySpace. The largest and most pointless thing ever created in the history of humanity. And now twitter is going the same way.
For the casual observer though, there’s something a little odd about twitter’s business model. You see, they don’t have any ads – and they let you send and receive updates via text message for free. So how dow they expect to make money, let alone stay in business?Simple. Once they reach a critical mass, they’ll start charging for sending text messages. Already, a lot of users are using their phones so they can “stay in touch” while out and about. Many of them are finding they can’t live without twitter on their phone. (Yes, they are sad, sad people.)
But imagine twitterers are sending a million messages a day between them (which is easily achievable) and only 5% of those are sent from a phone. Now imagine twitter makes 50 cents from each of those messages. That’s $25,000 a day or $9,125,000 a year in revenue without even trying, with very little required in the name of network resources and a site so basic it hurts just to think about it.
What I’d really like to see is a twitter competitor with more functionality and a clearer delineation between real friends and people think they’re cool and somehow get off on telling the whole world every time they go to the toilet. Unfortunately, it may already be too late…
Last edited by tritium on Sun Oct 18, 2009 11:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
Proculation
CKA Super Elite
Posts: 6452
Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 11:16 am
I mostly use twitter to follow news and some subject with hashtags. And I send interesting things I find or respond back to people. I don't understand the point of describing your life to strangers like that.
Guy_Fawkes
CKA Elite
Posts: 4451
Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 11:17 am
I thought it was interesting for about two weeks, I havent gone back to it since.
xerxes
CKA Super Elite
Posts: 8878
Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 11:20 am
I gave it a try and decided it was just stupid. It's just the status update from Facebook minus the pictures of the people doing the posting.
And I remember reading a little while back that 80% of the postings are done by somethign like 10-15% of the users.
Brenda
CKA Uber
Posts: 44545
Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 11:25 am
I have never seen the importance of Twitter, so I never even looked at it.
bootlegga
CKA Uber
Posts: 13354
Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 11:52 am
I find Twitter mind-numbing and silly. Really, how much information can you say in 140 characters? I signed up about a year ago and tried it out, but found it a waste of time. I then added the Twitter app on Facebook, so one updates the other, but otherwise, I hardly ever use it.
But Twitter does have its uses, despite its appearance of mind-numbing uselessness. It was used extensively by activists last year in Tibet, Iran and Mumbai to spread the word about what was actually happening. In some cases, it was more accurate than actual newscasts on what was happening. I think overtime it will evolve into something quite useful, but for now it is a little ahead of its time.
xerxes wrote:
And I remember reading a little while back that 80% of the postings are done by somethign like 10-15% of the users.
That actually happens to be the case in many things...
I find twitter is the internet in miniature. I do use it but mostly from my phone and not when I am on the computer with a keyboard and mouse. I think the idea of twitter works well as a way to send a very succinct message to a very targeted audience very quickly is where the strength in this design comes from. However, there is a lot of static from people who are into fads but that has never been an issue for me as I don't follow people or events I am not interested in.
I see facebook and social media like the CKA forums just a more verbose version of twitter. I do use the phone to scan them as well as I have an app for facebook and the browser on the phone can handle the forums well enough but if I want to do a response that is longer then a few sentences then the phone is not the medium I want to use to conjure that message.
Chumley
CKA Elite
Posts: 3461
Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 1:22 pm
xerxes wrote:
Quote:
That actually happens to be the case in many things...
Never twitted myself. Actually, as far as talking to strangers, CKA is pretty much it for me, though I have a facebook account that I occasionally look at.
OnTheIce
CKA Elite
Posts: 4525
Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 2:09 pm
I laugh at people that tell me they "tweet".
I mean, really.....nobody cares when you're dropping a "deuce"....no need to let all your "followers" know about all your activities.
Proculation
CKA Super Elite
Posts: 6452
Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 2:54 pm
OnTheIce wrote:
I laugh at people that tell me they "tweet".
I mean, really.....nobody cares when you're dropping a "deuce"....no need to let all your "followers" know about all your activities.
Twitter is also about sharing informations.
xerxes
CKA Super Elite
Posts: 8878
Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 3:10 pm
ASLplease wrote:
xerxes wrote:
Quote:
That actually happens to be the case in many things...
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