Why does the media think Twitter is the second coming?
March 7, 2008 – 1:25 pm
Even though the show is a mainly a ramble of random discussion amongst the participants, I’ve become a pretty regular listener of This Week in Tech . What makes the show great is the disparate cast of characters that Leo Laporte is able to cobble together for each show. Listening to the most recent TWiT episode I found myself mesmerized by an in-depth discussion on the topic of Twitter vs. Pownce that raised some interesting questions about the best platform for this type of service. Dave Winer had the most opinionated position on Twitter as a platform, suggesting that the incumbent Pownce offers a much better API.
One thing I agree with that was highlighted in the discussion is that the short message limit keeps the content digestible. We’ve seen a surge in the mantra that short form content is king, and Twitter caters quite well to that demand. Given this I do see the possibilities for Twitter to be a platform for crowdsourcing news and communications. Yet, having looked around the tools available today I’d have to say we’re a long way off from realizing the reality of those possibilities. In order for Twitter to get to the point where it’s a contender for surfacing news and information the signal to noise ratio needs to be addressed. There are tools emerging that’ll help but we have a long way to go before we’ve made enough progress for Twitter to be a must have. While the platform figures itself out the question I can get out of my head is will Twitter grow fast enough to avoid the fate of many web applications (Pointcast, anyone).
One observation that most fanatics miss when talking about Twitter is the niche it fills. If you take a step back and look at the most successful of Web 2.0 companies you’ll find a cadre of sites and applications that do well amongst a younger generation. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and others all developed notoriety amongst a young online audience. The one thing today’s youth have no problems with is communication, and when an idea like Facebook takes hold, it spreads like wildfire. On the other hand Twitter is a tool that seems to be popular not within youth markets but among the digerati and pundits who analyze these things. With the likes of Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte, Veronica Belmont, Guy Kawasaki, Merlin Mann and Chris Brogan, the top Twits on Tweeterboard or Twitterholic reads like a who’s who to the blogging and start-up community for Web 2.0 companies. I can’t help but wonder if Twitter will be a ghost town with everyone at SXSW this weekend.
Being a researcher I had to look at some numbers to convince myself that I’m not just guessing at a trend. According to my rough guesstimates, after 1 year Twitter.com had a site reach of approximately 0.12% of users, Facebook 0.8%, and YouTube? 7%. The Facebook numbers are even handicapped by the fact that for three quarters of their first year you had to be a student to join. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is a little bit of an apples to oranges comparison given that Twitter relies heavily on an API and distributed use, but I still believe that the numbers show that there has been too much excitement built up around a social platform that quite frankly seems to cater to social media pundits.
I can’t help but think back to a focus group about blogs that I did in 2006 with a teen audience. When asked what they thought of Blogs one teen turned to me and said, “that’s something my uncle would do”. The message here is that the social generation, the ones that made YouTube, Facebook and MySpace famous, they’re not looking at a micro-blogging platform as sexy. I think social media developers need to spend less time developing apps for themselves and think more about what they need to do to offer tools for the social generation.
Tags: API, Chris Brogan, dave winer, Guy Kawasaki, Leo Laporte, madness, media, Merlin Mann, online audience, podcast, pownce, Robert Scoble, social, social generation, social media developers, social media pundits, tech, twit, twitter, Veronica Belmont, web applications, YouTube
