It seems that Twitter is looking to cash in on its users according to this unsurprising news story. Perhaps the collective twitter mind could be tapped for some inspired business ideas. Imagine a tweet from twitter…we love giving you this free service but someone has to pay, send us your ideas.
Twitter hiring workers to turn Tweets into money | Reuters.
Twitter has been on my mind a bit lately and David Carr’s piece reminded me of a draft post I have in the pile of unfinished stuff lying around. At first I thought the two lines of thought might cross over but Davi’d article takes a fairly familiar line so I guess my Twitter Confession will have to wait.
I am going to have a look at David’s article because I am starting to suspect that Twitter is more hype than substance but it may yet become something. What? Well I think Twitter is a ready made tool to replace the News and Advertising industries that until recently was married under the auspices of the newspaper industry. I think there are some reasonable grounds to make that assertion but let’s have a look at some of David’s claims with regard to Twitter.
First, there is the claim that Twitter is somehow an essential part of the internet plumbing, that the internet service provided by Twitter is so deeply meshed with all the other services that it must survive. An example is this blog, where you can tweet this story using the “share/save” button. This groovy little bit of code makes it easy for you to send these words anywhere else with just a few mouse clicks. If you take that functionality and apply it across the web then you can get some sort of picture of the sort infiltration that David means by his quote
“Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”
Okay, Twitter is part of the landscape whether or not it does anything. With such built in connectivity it is likely that Twitter will achieve some sort of critical mass and take on a life of its own. Possibly it is already there but before it becomes entrenched it will need to do a couple of things. First it needs to start making money for someone because no web service can survive for free over time, either they are subsidised by another profitable activity or they make a buck in their own right. The hard fact of life is that there is nothing free about providing a service on the net. This site costs money, facebook costs money to the people supplying it, Google costs money.
So Twitter will eventually have to attend to business. When it does then we will have a better idea about motivation and rewards, until then however Twitter’s business model seems primarily one of garnering sufficient mindshare to justify its existence.
The other thing Twitter will need to do is establish a much better track record in terms of service availability. Twitter Fail is fairly common in my experience and this is tied in with the business side of Twitter. To put it simply, providing a 99.999% reliable service on the net costs money, more money than Twitter can probably afford. So the gurus at Twitter probably sweat their arses off hoping it all holds together until someone comes up with the money for them to deploy a better service. In the meantime we get lots of “we are working on it” type announcements.
David acknowledges the issue of service reliability in his article but he seems more concerned with what Twitter can do for you and me. According to David, Twitter can keep us informed and up-to-date. It’s the electronic pulse of humanity, you just need to put your finger on the right spot.
It’s at this point that I think we need to stop and look seriously at what is being claimed for Twitter. According to Clay Shirky who David quotes;
“Anything that is useful to both dissidents in Iran and Martha Stewart has a lot going for it; Twitter has more raw capability for users than anything since e-mail.”
How is this raw capacity defined? It sounds like an impressive claim but one that David fails to substantiate. He then goes on to parrot the now familiar lines that Twitter represents some collective networked intelligence, a claim that may be true but one that begs the question of so what? According to David, this collective intelligence is best deployed helping him decide what netbook to buy or what is going on with flights during a US style terror scare. It seems uncritical thinking on his part, and it avoid the corollary. That is just how much time and mindshare is absorbed by being part of the Twitter experience.
And it is at this point that I really depart from David’s line of thinking. From my experience Twitter is a interactive now type of internet service. What is happening now is millions of tweets are filling up cyberspace with what’s currently of interest to the authors. And then there are the retweets and the corresponding conversations, but all of it is very NOW. Switch off twitter, as I have done for the last month or so of my break from uni, and suddenly life seems slower.
What you get from Twitter depends on who you follow and how often you use the service. For journalists and other media professionals I can easily see the usefulness of Twitter after all currency is the what drives the News industry. For the average punter I guess there is some value in tapping directly into the mindshare of the masses when something is happening but the question remains is it something we need? And given the business imperative that Twitter must deal with sooner or later, what will commercial interests do once they figure out a way to exploit the collective mind?
The bottom line for me is that Twitter is another time sink. It is also another mind grabber. Sure I can ration my use, I can organise my internet patterns so that it’s sitting in the background but the fundamental fact remains that unless I actually engage with Twitter, which means time and effort, it does nothing extra for me. The collective wisdom is what Andrew Keen discussed in his book “The Cult of The Amateur” and although I disagree with his predictions with regard to the creative mind, his points about the wisdom of the masses are well worth considering.
David is probably right in the sense that Twitter is here for the foreseeable future even if the retention rate of service adopters remains at it’s current level. It is hard to see Twitter disappearing overnight but it is also hard to see what is going to take Twitter to the next level of a “must have” internet service. Hype of the kind that David and other evangelists preach might drive a few more people to look at Twitter but the constant on feature is not, as claimed, a bonus in terms of our already busy lives.
Why Twitter Will Endure – NYTimes.com.
Internet Vices – Patrick Moberg.
Have you ever wondered what’s behind Twitter or Facebook? The people at TechCrunch have put together some data on the companies as well as some comparative analysis.
As Facebook Nears 100M U.S. Visitors, Twitter Falls Further Behind In The Rear-View Mirror.
But looking into the crystal ball for Facebook, what are we to make of “Facebook Connect”? If you listen to Josh Elman, at the end of his video he makes some predictions about the great experience of sharing you online activity with your friends, presumably also online – bringing experiences online…
“in the past you usually had to make this trade-off between sitting and watching something at your computer, by yourself or at your office or your dorm or maybe go with friends and maybe watch something on TV, or try to crowd around a little screen. Now what’s great is that you can take everybody sitting in their dorm rooms, sitting at their offices, watching something and interact with them real time and really share with what they’re doing…by making that experience that used to be solo totally social we will see a lot more people sharing and exploring online”
Maybe Simon has something here. I have seen good bloggers become obsessed with tweeting because its all about the speed and the network. A tweet begets another tweet and somehow all the tweeting reveals to everyone some hitherto unspoken wisdom. Its the wisdom of the crowd…uh oh that’s not right. Its many different views on a subject all neatly bundled up for us in the form of a series of 140 character tweets. How neat!
As a form of almost instant communication that can link in shortform to everything else on the net, tweeting looks useful as a tool to break news but how can anyone understand what’s going on via twitter without being hooked into the twitterverse? Where are the filters, the aggregators, the distillers, the people who can communicate to the non-tweeters?
Is the message, the genuine news in danger of being drowned in the tweet tweet of “I hate kittens…me too…kittens are cute, get a life…”
Twitter, Facebook, Social Media Make Us Talk in Soundbites – Advertising Age – The Media Guy.
