I’ve joined the dark side
I have joined Twitter. I generally hate flavour of the month technology fads and Twitter is no exception. I am already really annoyed with the media coverage of Twitter. It seems like every time I turn on the radio I hear about it. That being said, you can follow me here.
I mainly joined Twitter so I could follow the likes of John Resig and Neal Gafter as well as some other interesting techie people and I am already mildly annoyed with the service.
I expected that Twitter would offer me a client similar to Live Messenger or Google Talk. Instead, I had to find a third-party client. Furthermore the one everyone uses is only available on Mac and has ads unless you pay $15. If anyone knows of a good windows standalone client, please let me know.
Additionally, I have been trying Twitter for all of 2 hours now, and I’ve realized this whole micro-blogging thing really irks me. I am following people I consider to be really smart not because I care what they ate for dinner, or what videos they are currently watching. I am following them because I want to know more about what they are working on and thinking in terms of technology.
That being said, if and when I start following my actual real life friends, I will be interested in what they are doing currently. Maybe Twitter should take that into account? Have different classifications of tweets, ones for personal friends and ones for the public? Or maybe Twitter just isn’t for me. Perhaps I should just stick with traditional blogs and instant messenging clients.
Also, there are huge privacy concerns with an app like this. Although there is an option to have only certain people see your updates, the whole spirit of Twitter is to be a public micro-blogging system. I don’t even want to get into how careful you have to be with what you post there. Sometimes public messenging can get you in trouble. Something many people have found out the hard way with facebook. Also something Charlie Villanueva recently found out.
From a technology standpoint, Twitter is an alright service I guess, although for me it really lacks the wow factor. It seems to me that its a pretty direct translation of IPmulticast leveraging SMS and pretty much nothing else.
Twitter seems like a pretty linear service, unless I’m missing something. I’m guessing that it’s success is due to the fact that they really targetted mobile phones, but in reality it just seems to be a gimped version of RSS. I don’t even think they were the first to offer micro-blogging. Additionally, there are alternative open source models which have pretty much the same functionality for micro-blogging, like Google Jaiku and facebook’s new (and annoying) what’s on your mind? feature.
What does Twitter really offer me? It’s not a full feature web app like facebook or myspace, its not an internet overlord like Google… Their one advantage is SMS. They don’t even have downloadable clients from what I can tell. They rely on user made clients.
It’s cool that they already have a bunch of people using it (I almost added Shaq to my watch list). But will it really have the staying power once the initial novelty of the app wares off? Their functionality isn’t that hard to reproduce and improve upon…
Unless Twitter leverages the SMS platform in some other unique way or they expand or add some other functionality, I will be surprised if it is anything other than a flavour of the month micro-blogging tool (for me anyway). Which is fine by me, there are enough programs I check every day anyway. But I suspect with its rush of popularity, we will hopefully be seeing something more interesting coming from the Twitter people sometime soon. Until that time comes, let me know of some interesting people you think I should be following.
March 23rd, 2009
But will it really have the staying power once the initial novelty of the app wares off? Their functionality isn’t that hard to reproduce and improve upon…
Although I agree with you that Twitter is nothing special, I do have a bit of a problem with this statement.
Sure, Twitter isn’t that complicated to implement. However, I think it’s the novelty of the idea that is more important. I can think of many useful technologies that aren’t especially complicated or difficult to reproduce. What sets them apart was someone saw that that could be done. In fact, I would say that the most impressive technologies/apps are the ones that are simple and evoke that “Oh shit, that’s so obvious and awesome and yet I didn’t even see it” kind of feeling.
March 24th, 2009
@cam,
While you do have a point, and I agree that it was a good idea, and they do have a large userbase, I still think they need to do more. Twitter was founded in 2006 and since then have added basically zero functionality that I know of. My argument isn’t that the idea is a bad one, but rather, it is easy to reproduce and improve upon.
Twitter has a giant presence right now, but if someone releases something with the exact same functionality but also includes a couple other awesome features, will twitter still hold the majority?
Who knows.
March 24th, 2009
I know: most likely. People tend to stick to what they’re familiar with unless there is a compelling feature.
Example: Hotmail. Webmail isn’t rocket science, and there are many, many, webmail services. Most people started with Hotmail or Yahoo mail. Google offers far and away a superior product with Gmail. Want to know who’s on top? Yahoo and Hotmail. Heck, you even still use Yahoo mail.
March 28th, 2009
I completely agree with you Kevin. Twitter is a sad sad platform. 90% of the people using it are on their because they are pretentious pricks that think everyone should know what they just ate.
Of course the are all “tweeting” every second of their waking lives spamming about the most pointless things. They call it a platform for a social “conversation” when they should precede that term with “unintelligent”.
Stick to blogs if you think you have something to say people. Someone will find you if its relevant and intelligent. Don’t go seeking “followers” and attention by spending every waking hour online. Marketing people think Twitters some godly tool; If they are self-absorbed enough they can find other idiots with similar cock-eyed ways of thinking to do business with, or “learn” from.
These forum trolls have moved from their topics and into Twitter’s “tweets”. Enjoy a PR person’s dream and a, REAL, web developers worst nightmare. Keep on making my job irrelevant by thinking you know something about social networking through this tool. Twitter, and the people who worship it, make me sick!
~Let the flaming begin