First off, Twitter is a great idea. But it was only really good at the start. Unlike most new technologies it got worse with scale. First with slowdowns and outages as they added features, then as a result of information overload as more people came online.

I don’t know that I entirely agree with Scott Carp that it is a massive waste of time. But I appreciate his saying so because I have used Twitter less and less lately. The problem is that relevance is very hard to realize until you have it. Twitter may be a conversation ecosystem, but it’s neither a successful intermediary nor a compete medium.

Carp points to the issue of only getting half of a conversation, but that’s only part of it, the main problem is it needs to find a way to be all things to all people, and despite improvements and growth it has failed to achieve that with scale.

Twitter became an easy way to follow people we know and respect. But it’s not the most efficent way. It’s a work in progress, but the issue as with most of the long tail is one of the filter. Without a better way of sorting what goes through it, it’s just an additional stream of mostly unnecessary data.

Tags: Twitter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 12:04 am and is filed under editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.