Twitter me this
The latest fad riding the nerd wave of the current Internet Web 2.0 resurgence bubble is a new application from Obvious Corp called Twitter. Twitter is a web-based application that allows you to post short messages (up to 140 characters) that anyone can subscribe to.
What’s the point of it all I hear you asking; well in my opinion not a fucking lot. Essentially the majority of Twitter’s ever increasing user base (60,000+ with a growth rate of 20% per week) use the service to post updates on their regular day and whereabouts. “I ate a pie”, “On my way to Maccas”, and ”Going to work by car” are some rather random examples of dullness you can expect from your average Twitter. These messages are often displayed on their owner’s blogs and websites linking into the Twitter service similarly to the way Flickr allows you to display your most recent photos on a web page, using a custom API (Application Programming Interface).
So why is it so popular? It’s rather a good question actually. It seems the tech gods have rather smiled on this little side project with some of the world’s top tech celebs jumping on board, Leo Laporte being one of them is currently one of Twitters most active users according to Twitter monitoring site Twitterholic. By subscribing to Leo or any other number of celebs cashing in on the service’s current popularity you can follow their lives in an almost stalker like fashion but who really wants to subscribe to Joe Blogs from LA’s feed and see what type of sandwich he just ate? Family & friends perhaps? Maybe but I doubt even they’d care that much!
It seems that others are using the application as if it were a permanently online instant messaging service. You’ll often see messages beginning with “@Veronica” meaning your latest post is directed to the user Veronica but this requires that all your friends use Twitter and your entire conversations are open for the world to read. Why wouldn’t you send an email or a text message?
Presently there is no advertised strategy behind Twitter; no business model to support the tool and perhaps there will never be one but without it like many Internet fads I believe you’ll soon find the sign up rate dropping off and the user posts rapidly declining. My biggest problem with it is who could be fucking bothered?! What incentive do I, a regular nobody, have to be doing this and who could give a flying fuck?
Strategically for the application to have some legs will require some business acumen. There’s always that age-old Internet trait of popping in advertising but frankly that would just piss everyone off, no one wants ads in their messages unless the user’s getting some bank as a result. The one area I haven’t seen any real mention of is business, using Twitter as notification tool for example, perhaps providing a licensed installer to deploy the application on a local network, these are areas I think will need to be explored for there to be any longevity in the project.
There’s plenty of people out there who are in love with this product and plenty who aren’t. It’s quite a fiery debate at present but Twitter to me is nothing more than another fad in a long list that will die a natural death. I wont be signing up for an account any time soon but please feel free to try it out yourself and let me know what you think.
Some Twitters to check out:
Twitter Links:
