Twitter — the lovable and sporadic "mini-blog" is in the public eye yet again, but instead of the usual adulation, its future is being painted as unfortunately bleak. I don't understand the general presumption that Twitter's demise is imminent. How can you grow bored with something that changes constantly? Besides that, Twitter is still extremely young, and has so much room for adaptation. Denying its success is like condemning Ruby On Rails based exclusively on its popularity. Because if you do that, rhinos demolish your house and trade your animals for cherry popsicles. Tough, isn't it?

Most of Twitter's popularity comes from its speed. There's no time to plan out a Twitter "tweet", and no space for long-winded commentaries on Life, the Universe, and Everything™ (I invariably end up doing these anyway). Because it's so rapid and straight to the point (excluding my snippets, of course), Twitter appears ideal for spur-of-the-moment decisions. The ability to collect your friends' updates in a RSS feed for a client like Twitterific (Mac) or Twitteroo (Windows) or even on your phone — which I usually forget that I carry around, and have probably accidentally killed small fish with at this point — is crazy handy. Remember SXSW? All sorts of raunchy Twitter-related events occurred there, things that I unfortunately could not attend. This is one of many times I have wished I owned a jetpack.

As much as I wish that Twitter would increase the character limit from 140 to 180, where I believe it was before, or add an edit button, I know that this would ruin Twitter and needlessly complicate the simple process of typing and hitting "Update" (note that using "Submit" as a value for a button has phased itself out — except for my site; why am I always the goddamn exception?).

Twitter has also received a decent amount of press coverage. I was pleasantly surprised to find a positive mention from Time Magazine. But the reason for this post, and one of the only negative comments I've found on the subject, is a piece from Web1979 — in a post cynically titled RIP Twitter (2007-2007), the author (Mat Balez) lists three specific reasons of why Twitter will inevitably "fail":

Possible reasons for "failure"

1. Where’s the Value? —

   There is no substance to the house of cards that is Twitter. No deep content, nothing to learn, no reason to keep coming back to the trough, other than the thrill/obsession of pre-adolescent voyeurism - which is simply not reason enough for busy professionals. I’ve not seen a single legitimate, value-generating use of Twitter explained or demonstrated.

   But that's just the point, isn't it? It's not meant to be in-depth or revealing. It's exactly what you want it to be. And the voyeurism comments frustrate me. It's like when Facebook introduced RSS feeds for profile pages, and people accused them of furthering stalker-ish behavior. I personally like being able to know what my friends do without having to manually check their individual pages. It's the same for Twitter — I think we can agree that people who spend more than a few minutes of time on Twitter, unless they're browsing other profiles, need something better to do.

2. Too Much Effort —

   People are lazy. Anything that requires too much time, effort and attention simply won’t succeed in a sustainable way unless it’s tremendously valuable (which Twitter is not, see #1).

   Twitter requires minimal effort as I stated above. Sign up, log in, and update. These people, who updated in the last thirty seconds, are totally having a blast. Maybe you just didn't get invited to their party.

3. Key Users Will Bail —

   Ah, the double-edged sword of network effects. I suspect that once the community anchors in Twitterati start to give up on it (and they will; wait for the SXSW hangover to take effect) it won’t take long for the entire house to crumble.

   You mean "Twitterati" like Kottke and Cederholm? Or perhaps 2008 Presidential Candidate John Edwards? Because they didn't bring anything to the community that wasn't there already. What you're depending on, for this argument to stand, is that various fans of these "Twitterati" won't be able to make decisions on their own (probably due to their lack of gall bladders, which of course, they must have donated to their favorite bloggers).

   Sidenote: What's this fascination with "A-List Bloggers"? Why are we such fangirls/boys all of a sudden? For chrissakes, stop making yourself subordinate, simply because you don't get as many hits. Quality, not quantity is what wins you college basketball tournaments. The alternative would be amusing, though.

Read 2 comments (Leave a comment?)

Erik said:

I agree with you in that sense that I don’t believe that Twitter will ‘fail’ with such a speed. However, I think it’s important to take Twitter for what it is; a simple status/update network. It’s when people read more into it it get’s more shallow and useless. Another point for it’s failure is the fact that it’s such a simple system, meaning that there are several other services just like it (like Jaiku and more). People will jump from service to service as they are free and they have friends “on the other side”; which will get people bored and tired.

I’m not much for Twitter myself, but taking it for what it is (buzzword-webtwopointoh-userdriven-social-status/update-network-whatever) I don’t think it willl have any problem in the nearest future.

Posted on April 12, 2007 6:45 AM; Permalink

Ranjani said:

But people have used it for far more complex things than a “status-update network”. It, like several other programs out there, is familiar, and can be adapted to fit whatever purpose — it just takes a little bit of creativity :)

Posted on April 13, 2007 9:39 PM; Permalink

 Metropolitician » Yes, it's crossed my mind

"A semi-complete analysis of Stikkit and other services....,"

Posted on May 7, 2007 11:52 PM