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.
[...] The Problem(s) With Twitter — First off, Twitter is a great idea. [...]
Funny I read this on yr blog the day AFTER I start following you on Twitter.
Yeah, you got me thinking about it again.
Snaps, Ben. I’ve never used Twitter, and have always seen it as nothing more than a novelty. It is social networking information overload. And I can’t help but wonder how much of its popularity (or appearance of popularity) comes from marketers checking it out, trying to figure out where we can work a marketing message in there. This summer, it seemed like the entire advertising industry joined Facebook. Are we really that fascinated by it? Or are we just trying to figure it out so we can explain to our clients how we can (or can’t) leverage it?