Is Twitter Too Big to Succeed?
Like Old Man Stewart, I am a Twitter skeptic, enamored of the cleverness certain writers display via their feeds, but doubtful that the 140 character social networking utility merits the media attention it is garnering, the insistence of so many new media consultants that their clients need to Tweet, and financial valuations I can hardly fathom. Perhaps one day its owners are going to be drunk on Johnnie Walker Gold, their yacht cruising around the Mediterranean, gloating via tiny urls that people like me were wrong, but I think it’s more likely that they’ll look back on Facebook’s $500 million offer as a foolish proposition to have turned down.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown is right, I think, to call Twitter the Second Life of 2009. But I’d like to focus on its similarities to MySpace. Do you remember the early days of that site? It helped its users to connect to one another more effortlessly than they’d ever experienced before — so easily, in fact, that soon one’s MySpace “friends” came to include people who thought you looked cute in your profile picture, and bands whose free show you almost went to but didn’t, and attractive looking women who said they liked your profile picture but turned out to be trolls from some Online porn site, until you decided that MySpace made it too easy to connect with people, and you switched to Facebook, which at least organized itself according to people with whom you’d attended high school or college (which is to say, the semi-exclusive social networks you were already part of).
In Washington DC, many of my friends use Twitter to say that they’re going to be grabbing a drink at such and such bar after work, or that they’ll be on a panel at such and such think tank. I predict that within a year or two, either the wider Twitter frenzy will die down, or else all these people will switch to a Twitter replacement that is more exclusive, or at least provides a better way to separate “Tweets” one actually wants to get from “Tweets” one doesn’t. At that point, Twitter will look a lot like MySpace does today — it’ll be populated mostly by people who would use a more exclusive platform to raise their public profile or sell their product or whatever, if only there were another platform willing to grant them access to an audience.
Will Leitch did a pretty good story on Twitter for New York magazine, but I think he was a little too credulous about their profit scheme. One of the more telling lines in the story was when one of the Twitter founders said something like “No one was asking Google what their profit model was in 1998”. Words to that effect, anyway. But that’s the thing— compared to its size, both real and in the public imagination, and to the perception of its value and its stock price, Google isn’t a very profitable company. And they have a far more obvious set of business models than Twitter.
It’s crazy to me that, almost ten years after the dotcom bubble, people still pump investment capital into companies that are on the “we’ll figure out how to make money later” plan.
— Freddie · Mar 6, 09:50 PM · #
amen! social networking doesn’t qualitatively change the nature of socializing…because we’re humans.
— razib · Mar 6, 10:28 PM · #
The story I heard was that this offer was virtually all stock (I don’t know if this is true), in which case it was predicated on ~$15BB valuation for FB. Ha Ha.
— Jim Manzi · Mar 6, 11:21 PM · #
Twitter actually has a very good way to separate the tweets you want to read from the ones you don’t want to read: Just unfollow anyone who’s tweets you don’t want to read!
— Henk ter Heide · Mar 8, 09:18 AM · #
I think Twitter will continue to thrive but that it’s way overvalued. It can be very useful in certain contexts like at a conference, and is a useful grassroots promotional tool.
Google IS a very profitable company in terms of margins, but its public shareholders overvalue it. Especially when you consider the way Sergey, Larry & Co. set up the ownership structure.
— Derek Scruggs · Mar 10, 06:57 PM · #
“In Washington DC, many of my friends use Twitter to say that they’re going to be grabbing a drink at such and such bar after work, or that they’ll be on a panel at such and such think tank.”
Sounds like an excellent tool for that purpose (assuming they have other friends using Twitter who may want to join them for drinks).
I share your skepticism about the social marketing folks who have a nail and so they decided Twitter is yet another hammer. On the other hand, people are using Twitter for all sorts of things; it seems to be a remarkably malleable tool. And there are open source versions being developed that can be run as infinitely exclusive networks, if that’s what someone really wants.
— Kenneth · Mar 10, 10:03 PM · #
I’ll second @Henk ter Heide: stop following people if you don’t want their updates. Or let them know that it’s boring to always here what ridiculously mundane activity they’re doing right then, and then if they continue, stop following them. The mechanism already exists – you just aren’t using it right.
— Ethan Zlomke · Mar 11, 01:56 AM · #
Of course my remark of a few days ago will only make sense if you’re already on twitter. So this is for the people who still have to discover Twitter:
There are four ways on Twitter to see what people are saying:
1. You can view the general Timeline. That’s were all the tweets from everybody who is tweeting right now are listed. As you might expect it’s generally a very chaotic place to be.
2. You can view your personal Timeline. That’s the place were tweets are listed from those people you choose to follow. How chaotic of a place this is depends on the number of people you follow and how much they are writing right now.
3. You can view your replies. That’s were the tweets are listed that are directed at you. In general they are from people answering your questions or asking you questions.
4. And then there is DM. Direct Messages. DM is meant to be the place for people who want to send you a private messages. But it’s also the place were people thank you for following them and try to sell you their “free” marketing course. (Which is only a problem when you follow a lot of people, as I do.)
I spend most of my time on the replies page and sometimes when I’m bored I’ll look at my personal Timeline. But I never visit the general Timeline.
When using Twitter you have to remember that it’s some what a kin to television: With 40 channels on no one expects you to watch each and every show. You turn your TV set on to watch a specific show or you channel jump to find something.
The same goes with Twitter. You select one of the people you follow to see what they are saying or you follow your personal Timeline to find some interesting conversation. And then you go to bed :)
BTW Before you ask. Is there spam on Twitter?
In the last few months I have had two people who thought they could spam me via the replies page. I unfollowed and blocked them immediately. They won’t bother me again. I assume everybody will react the same way.
Which means that the only people spammers can spam are each other :)
— Henk ter Heide · Mar 13, 02:21 PM · #