Cannot agree, at all. Anecdotal evidence only, but I find myself using twitter less and less. If anything, what I'm using it for these days is to follow someone interesting (like a developer on a project I like, or, since I'm also into Olympic lifting, those types of people) and see if they tweet anything.
So, I lurk and follow. Rarely do I engage anymore. And they are never conversations since 1. twitter absolutely SUCKS as a communication platform (can't see what people reply to a person, can't see what people say about a subject...no way to aggregate the information etc) and 2. twitter still, to this day, drops tweets.
#2 fathoms me. As an experiment I followed the exact same people from two different twitter accounts. Using twitter.com for both, I had remarkably different streams. This is just awful.
Even so it seems that most of Twitter is marketing these days. Spam upon spam upon spam followers and replies. And most everyone is selling something and tweeting about it. It gets very, very tiring.
Twitter isn't really interesting to me anymore. Not sure if it will be in the future, but I don't see myself using it much in the near term.
A colleague described Twitter as "marketing people yelling at other marketing people". I see his point, but I find that in my local community, Twitter serves a purpose. There are frequent conversations between local individuals interested in urban renewal in my city, which often include city councillors, officials in various capacities, journalists, and so on. So this is interesting and quite valuable.
But there's no question there's a huge amount of noise. And I question whether anyone who follows more than 300 or 400 people is actually reading much at all in their stream.
I agree. I was an addict 2 years ago, a frequest user a year ago, and now rarely check my stream, and never post anything.
For me personally, I'm kind of over social networks entirely. I don't find them interesting any more. I'm hoping to see a revival in personal home pages, where you can share your thoughts in a place that you own and control. We just need the mechanic that makes it dead simple for others to consume the content (Wordpress is not it).
I'm hoping to see a revival in personal home pages, where you can share your thoughts in a place that you own and control.
To an extent, I think Tumblr fills that role. I post photo albums (which it handles well) and long text posts (which it doesn't) to my Tumblr, and people can 'like' them, comment and so on. The concept of 'reblogging' doesn't fit in with that though.
I completely agree. Twitter made social conversations worse and the timeline became more and more useless.
This is why twitter was for me the permanent second.
But i strongly believe that this is only one part of their future. Therefore the post.
Possibly irrelevant, but adding my experience anyway:
It might be niche experience, but twitter is awesome for me.
My swedish twitter-bubble is boiling with discussions, humor and interesting links and topics every day.
Some politicians even keep an active presence and respond\discuss in tweets when they can or even in blog-posts arguing their point or explaining a difficult topic.
I don't know if it's an English quote originally, or if it's confined to Swedish twitter, but there's a saying that goes "facebook makes you hate people you know, twitter makes you love people you don't." which I find quite apt.
There's a general positive attitude and a lot of people enjoy the every day struggles and joys of others rather than the self-censorship or inane postings often found on facebook. Admittedly, I'm sure that exists on twitter too, but in my twitter-bubble it's rare.
Some brave companies use it to give\encourage support for complaining users and to notify problems or errors rather than try to sell stuff. Even if few manage to actually _inform_ rather than try to sell things.
Journalists sadly tend to mostly only follow journalists, and social media experts follow social media experts, so their experience tend to be quite different and closed off.
While I, and most others I follow (so I guess it's equally 'closed'!) follow various people from various stratas of society, politicians, sick people, journalists and even homeless people.
It's quite alive, active and enjoyed, but I suspect it's quite easy to find relevant and amusing twitter-users when there's only a few thousand (Swedish tweeps) of them and the interesting\fun\literate ones follow other interesting\fun\literate ones.
[edit]It's also been described as "a competition in one-liners" and "a collection of lovable narcissists", which I also find very accurate.[/edit]
The only thing I've discovered about the discover feature is that I care very little for the things that the majority of people are tweeting about.
Not that I don't think it has promise. Once that feature is targeted more than just geographically (I'm guessing it is from the content) and has some sort of Googlesque awareness of my personal leanings then it might be extremely useful.
For the moment though I couldn't give two hoots about what it appears to be filled with, sports, celebrities or #banalMemeOfTheDay
This is such a puff piece that one has to wonder if it's not simply a PR plant.
I've been saying for the last year or more that Twitter is doomed. I stand by that prediction. Twitter was originally envisioned as a place for real-time status updates. It became a place where, to a certain extent, news broke but now? It seems to be a graveyard where people follow celebrities.
Not that there isn't necessarily a business model in following celebrities but it seems like the difference between being Facebook and being Myspace.
Twitter is (IMHO) terrible at conversations. As others have mentioned, they're disjointed.
This post raves about Twtitter's real time abilities and potential but:
1. There is only real-time data to process while people use it and, honestly, I don't see the incentive to produce it. Twtitter just seems to be another box your brand management company checks on their social media checklist; and
2. There's still no hint of a business model anywhere.
Honestly, the idea that Twitter will be "bigger than Google", even for a narrow area like "real time", is laughable.
I see Twitter as another "bubble" company (like Quora). People in the Valley think it's big because "everyone" (in the Valley) uses it but this gives a very distorted view. Twitter is more mainstream than Quora but I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter's 7-day actives were much lower than the ~175 million accounts and stagnant, even waning.
Who cars what other people do? If you don't follow people that retweet stupid celebrites its awesome. I get lots of intressting and funny tweets (or very short conversations) about poltics and computer sience. Don't blame twitter if you follow the wrong people.
Twitter is fine as it is for me, if the add other features they might be useful or the might not be useful as long as the main service dosn't change I don't really give a shit.
That said I dont belive that Twitter will ever be bigger then Google.
The problem is, even most interesting people to follow retweet random crap about their personal life at times, and when they do tweet interesting content, I sometimes want to have a conversation about it, which I can't do there.
I don't think Twitter is doomed - but I think they've been struggling to figure out their place in the world. I think this is starting to change now and would agree with many of the sentiments in the article - if not the hype re: it being bigger than Google - I couldn't see that happening in the short term anyway.
The other part of the problem people's views on Twitter/Facebook et al. is that your experiences on each network tend to be a reflection of how much effort you've put into getting the most out of each.
For example, for me, Twitter has FAR more value on a daily basis than Facebook. From my perspective, Facebook is a glorified flickr account. But that's just me. Meanwhile Twitter is my go to news source along with Hacker News. Market valuations wouldn't reflect my personal perspectives on each network!
Twitter needs to get MUCH better at helping users get the most out of their personal user experience on the network - otherwise it will never reach it's true potential.
Google+ has completely supplanted Twitter as a news source for me. With G+, you get actual paragraphs of information (often with pictures, etc). If there's a link, it's a real link, not one of those stupid damn shortened urls's (I REALLY hate those). With Twitter, a cryptic 100 character "message" and a url shortened link.
Good riddance to Twitter. G+ has a lot of room for improvement, but Twitter's lack of usability is mind boggling.
I completely agree that twitter got worse - especially at social conversations. This was the reason why i saw them - like you - as the forever second (if not last).
But the move to categorize, contextualise and present real time content and provide it for third partners is a big businessmodel. E.g. thousands of press agencies pay their bills like that - and twitter has already a pull by media houses to go that way. If developers were ok to pay for firehouse i am pretty sure mediahouses will pay for firehouse news.
And as said - i agree it sucks at several levels. But this wy to look at it gave me a new light to it.
Andi
ps: It's not a PR plant but my opinion, even if it's laughable.
Sure, but if Twitter is getting worse to the point where the vast majority its content is bots spamming each other and retweets of memes and timeless pithy quotes, then (i) the number of actual people actually using the service will drop off faster than Myspace and (ii) Twitter analysis isn't going to be worth paying Twitter for, especially with media agencies already able to monitor the comments of public figures at no charge and get link share stats from shorturl services.
I went to check the #discover tab on a lark. Absolutely nothing interested me. I have 4700+ tweets to my username, you'd think that would be enough info to show me one story about gaming perhaps (considering 99% of my tweets are about gaming).
The following people are recommended as interesting to me: Snoop Dogg (haven't listened to his records in years), Martha Stewart (have no real idea why I'd want that), Serena Williams (her off of the tennis?), Juanes (who?), the San Francisco Zoo (I'm in the UK...), Rachel Zoe (who?), Dana White (who?), etc...
There's a strong possibility that I'm hopelessly out of the loop. Either way, my opinion of the Twitter service remains unchanged.
Everything Twitter does, Tumblr seems to do better.
The main thing Twitter seems to be used for is retweeting amusing or interesting tweets -- often from comedy accounts, like "madeupstats" or "shitmydadsays". But Tumblr has way better content (in large part due to the elimination of the 140-char limit) and can do pretty much the same thing.
I never used Twitter much, but now I follow at least half a dozen Tumblrs. Some examples:
A very interesting read Andreas. Google's core is search, which real time is not quite ready to cover yet, but it will eventually.
For Twitter, it's hot right now. You're right about that.
If they focused on core and social, they could overtake Facebook soon, then Google in 5 years once real-time search tech becomes a reality. Everyone I know who regularly uses Facebook also uses Twitter. Either service could replace the other.
The interesting realisation for me - twitter doesn't need to beat facebook in social or communication. That's not their game. And Google "just" enables search and can improve via real time there. Twitter will put context to content. Think the "New York Real Times" or Press Agencies.
Agreed. But Twitter needs those page views from Facebook, that "time spent online" to be on their side of the fence rather than Facebooks. Real time is the next big thing.
But. Governments are cracking down. Real time, together with collaboration = swift revolutions. These are bad for all leadership positions, whether democraticly elected or not.
Real time will have a very large number of obstacles placed in its path by these authorities. But it's the natural course of evolution, and will most likely win out in the end.
Looking at negative opinions here, and my own small understanding of the subject, let me propose an alternate approach for Twitter to really become exciting again:
And no it is not exciting as you've premised in the article.
Here is an over-the-edge idea though: Merge Twitter with Square. Think. Probably Square will get a big consumer-face for its mobile payments company where every user of Twitter is able to exchange/collect/sell/charge anyone (friends) for petty purchases. And Twitter will get a business model.
Using a nicely integrated web-to-mobile-to-anything system, Twitter can empower people to use their twitter accounts to not only converse, but also share money with each other. Just like we do in college.
That's much more value than serving like a news hose. How does this sound to you?
So, I lurk and follow. Rarely do I engage anymore. And they are never conversations since 1. twitter absolutely SUCKS as a communication platform (can't see what people reply to a person, can't see what people say about a subject...no way to aggregate the information etc) and 2. twitter still, to this day, drops tweets.
#2 fathoms me. As an experiment I followed the exact same people from two different twitter accounts. Using twitter.com for both, I had remarkably different streams. This is just awful.
Even so it seems that most of Twitter is marketing these days. Spam upon spam upon spam followers and replies. And most everyone is selling something and tweeting about it. It gets very, very tiring.
Twitter isn't really interesting to me anymore. Not sure if it will be in the future, but I don't see myself using it much in the near term.