Scripting News: The future of Twitter?: “I’m very reluctant to dismiss Twitter as a passing fad, aware that many people said that about blogging, and I was sure they were wrong, and they were. Whenever so many people are so excited about something there must be some substance. It’s the same reasoning that makes me reject the idea that George W. Bush is stupid. You don’t get to be President and be stupid, and nothing frivolous gets to be as popular as quickly as Twitter has.”
and Michael Gartenberg:
“Perhaps I need to give it another try but it seems to me, this is going to be a really short lived fad. I could see where a group of good friends might use it under certain circumstances but long term? no way.”
It will be interesting to see where Twitter is one year from now. I think it’s here to stay.
My first reaction to Twitter was “Why?”
After trying it out I see the light. Like most new social networking sites/applications this does seem like a solution to an unidentified problem. In its current form its fun and a great extension of my individual web marketing efforts, but I can easily see a product being provided for customers to create privatge sub-networks. I’d easily use it in that form for a corporate user conference or embedded in a corporate intranet. That seems to be a ways off though.
In its current form I’m still not convinced its for everyone though and its a bit abstract to pitch to others. In the mean time I’ll enjoy it for what it is and continue to get updates from Borat, John Edwards and the other techies in my network.
The only problem with Dave’s logic (there are so often problems with his logic) is that on one hand he claims, “Whenever so many people are so excited about something there must be some substance” yet he goes on to discount George Bush’s stupidity, when clearly, many, many people believe it…
Thank GOD Dave Winer saw the light. Now Twitter is officially okay.
*sigh*
Twitter makes a lot of sense, it combines a lot of guilty pleasures into one service, those being:
1. Voyeurism aka Reality Shows (Oh, look what Sue is doing, she just twittered that she’s on her second martini and to not wait up, I wonder if she’s with that guy?).
2. Vanity (Hey, everyone, look at me! Look at what I’m doing!)
3. Laziness (I really don’t have the time to write a full blog post, I’ll just drop a little note).
While it may seem I’m disparaging Twitter I’m not, not exactly. I really does hit a lot of social buttons. You can quickly ingest it vs. reading a blog, you can easily gain a lot of subscribers since it is so quick people are more willing to sample and since twitters are so small you don’t have to feel guilty about having so many. Really Twitter is the fast-food of blogging.
Personally I don’t find any use in it, but then again I didn’t find any use in blogging when it was just people posting to their LiveJournal accounts. It wasn’t until blogs actually started enriching my life with news and programming tidbits that I started enjoying them. For Twitter to last longer than a South Beach night club it needs to gain some kind of enriching vs. distracting quality.
So Twitter, or something like it, will probably be around in a year, but I doubt very much that it’ll be in it’s current form.
I’m unsure of how I feel about twitter. I use it, and I’ve got a lot of mixed feelings about it.
The bad:
– The IM-client seems to work sparingly for me
– The website is ridiculously slow
– The javascript to utilize on my blog brings rendering my webpage to it’s knees
– People tend to use it as an IM, which in my opinion it shouldn’t be (“@Sue LOL”)
– Not a lot of people I care to follow on it.
The Good:
– Most of my points above are technical, and ‘easily’ solvable (i.e., not systemic of a bad idea)
– It’s new. So people are using it in ways that I find contrary to it’s usefulness, but perhaps one of us will change (people will use it for what it’s best for, or I’ll change my mind. 🙂 )
– It’s a great way of delivering content in micro-bursts. Some things are not blog-post worthy (“Hey, found this great site: blah.com – I’ll have to explore”), and might be good for mass people to see.
The biggest problem I see so far, for me, is that there’s not a lot of people I like to follow on it. I’ve got Kristopher and Thomas Hawk on it, and I enjoy the ‘twitters’ I get about new things in blogospheria, as well as Zooomr/etc. Ideally if I could get other people to publish using twitter (Steve Wozniak/Jobs, Will Wright, Warren Spector, etc.), I’d feel more compelled.
Anyhow, I think it’s a great idea, it just needs to carve out it’s niche more fully.
Also don’t see the compelling need here for Twitter.
Blog Rolls or RSS feeds will tell me what the people I like to read have new on their blogs/sites.
IMs will work for IMing.
Twitter to me seems a folly for the commercial brained (as in 30 second attention spanned morons).