My Frustration with Twitter
As a preface, the guys who started Twitter are brilliant, they created a service which no one realized they wanted, and turned it into hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, and created an entire ecosystem based around sharing links, emotions, and whats happening right now. They have built a cultural phenomenon, I just don’t believe it will last, at least in its current form.
Twitter has been aggravating me of late. It seems to be full of self-promoting and self aggrandizing on a scale never seen before. The annoying part is that almost none of the “social media experts” on Twitter are even slightly aware of their actions, and seem to be completely oblivious that their “buy from me” spewing is just a new form of spam.
Yes there are many people sharing useful information and generally contributing to the society that exists within Twitter, but they are getting fewer and farther between. What really bothers me about Twitter is not its populous, but its Soapbox promotion of these experts. That soapbox has people yelling very loud, and as PT Barnum learned, if you yell loud enough some people will listen. See trending hashtag of the #shooturself - these people are not adding anything.
Twitter holds in itself what Twitter seems to believe to be a new version of Alexander Bell’s telephone. Only they don’t own the lines, or the devices, or even the technology that it runs on. It is just a set of protocols, basically serving as a communal text messaging platform. That observation isn’t news, but what I’m getting at here is that Twitter’s use as a business to its owners and investors is purely as a utility. If it tries to be a media company, it will fail, because it is a fad. A fad that didn’t even truly go mainstream yet, it just caught on with the people *trying* to be cool. Twitter is like the person who used to operate the local switchboard for the telephone companies, as soon as the telecoms figured out how to automate that process, those people were no longer needed. As soon as we figure out that real time sharing of information doesn’t have to all go through the same service, Twitter is toast. What I’m doing right now has nothing to do with Twitter.
There is significant value in the positive information that I garner from my daily perusing of Twitter. Links are great, and the people that I’m interested in the techworld share useful and valuable information daily. But all of that is information I could easily get from RSS feeds, friendfeed, facebook, or a multitude of other options (new services are appearing everyday - like Google Buzz). Right now Twitter holds the illusion of control over that data exchange, but in reality, Twitter is simply the latest iteration of information exchange via the web. First came email, then the http protocol, then instant messaging. All of those are utility-type services that you can get for free and as soon as another service comes up and reveals that Twitters “control” is merely an illusion, users will shift, and along with them, Twitters value will - from ~$1 billion to zero.
Twitter is as much a business as email is a business. Making email better might be a business, and all of the great auxiliary companies built on Twitter are great businesses, but providing the protocols to send a message across the web is not a business. Well, maybe it was in 1997, but I believe we’ve moved on from that.
Sharing information that is valuable to me, is an important part of our open society, and I believe that Twitter has value, just as email and instant messaging have value - those services are still around today - and flourishing. Those services are not being monetized however, and are corollary parts tied into more extensive offerings. Twitter has the ability to make it as a large company, but I don’t think its heading down the right path. Right now its walking down that path like its the cock of the walk, and I certainly doesn’t deserve that posture.
