I recall almost 2 years ago being introduced to Twitter and I laughed at is saying “I’m already on Facebook, how many social networks can I be on?” Being a naturally curious person I signed up for an account and started to notice that the number of people following me had started to grow, maybe there is something to this after all? Fast forward to the last few months and everyone and their brother is talking about it. There isn’t a “celebrity” around who doesn’t have an assistant, I mean is personaly updating their Twitter account in some vain attempt to keep their Hollywood status.
Nielsen has done a great analysis of Twitter’s growth and of course compared them to other social networks such as Facebook and MySpace and the chart below compares the three sites ability to maintain a loyal user base.
With people such as Oprah, Barbara Walter (and the other hens from The View, expect Whoppie because she is her own person and doesn’t need to follow the masses) jumping onto Twitter the noise level on the service has started to become unbearable. What once made Twitter a unique service has now made it another ‘me-too’ offering and well there is only one direction those service eventually go…
If Twitter doesn’t make a significant move quickly those who once held it in high regards will jump to the next great thing.
While I agree with most of your post, I would take it one step further and argue that Twitter never had anything that made them a “unique service”.
They were a solution to a problem that never existed. Their business model is a mess (if there even is one). They don’t create/connecting communities as they’re not a social media play. They’re not as manageable as RSS feeds. They’re not as permanent as websites. They’re not as directed/attention grabbing as email/messaging and not as instant/unbiquotous as SMS. etc. etc.
I think Twitter, while trying to be the best of several worlds, simply fell short and ends up as a ‘jack of all trades, but master of none’.
If other posts can show me the clear benefit/differentiation of twitter, I’d be happy to change my mind… till then I remain highly critical. — now for ironic effect, excuse me while I tweet a link to my post