Twitter as we know it will be dead in a year

by kwongfucius on Mar.17, 2009, under Internet, Rant

There’s a new trend: Broad­cast my life! I am so interesting!

Now that every­one has the abil­ity to, every­one feels the need  …no, the oblig­a­tion to tell the world about every lit­tle thought they have and every bowel move­ment they make. No seri­ously, search for poo or bath­room on twit­ter, you’d be sur­prised. As I was telling my online neme­sis @violetmae (who by the way doesn’t know is my neme­sis yet), I don’t think there is enough inter­est­ing content/people to sup­port a site like Twit­ter for much longer. And now, with the main­stream­ing of Twit­ter, it will be over­loaded with com­plete drib­ble. Every­one from McCain, who doesn’t know how to email, to your mom (…lit­er­ally, your mom. I’m not try­ing to insult you) will be tweet­ing. It’s going to be a com­plete clusterf##k. Imag­ine if you got everybody’s Face­book sta­tus update in your news­feed. That’s going to be Twit­ter. It’d be the same as Youtube tak­ing over DirecTV …but worse! It’s 24/7 lol­cats, old man rants, and fat peo­ple dancing!

Then the next step in the Twit­ter move­ment would have to be a Hulu equiv­a­lent, a more focused site that only has qual­ity con­tent on it. But we already got that; that’s fmylife. But now fmylife has got­ten so pop­u­lar, it has con­se­quently gone to crap. Every­one with a key­board thinks they’re funny and they’ve started gam­ing fmylife with fake posts, fake posts that aren’t even good! I tried to show my friend fmylife the other day and told him how funny it was. We went through two pages before we found some­thing even mildly amus­ing. I was embar­rased. Worse thing was, the post was obvi­ously a fake. You’d need a whole cot­tage indus­try just to shift through the mess and aggre­gate what was worth­while. And the sad truth would be, most of it wouldn’t be worth my pre­cious time. Money, friends, online accounts …my time is the only thing I can’t make more of.

Here’s an even sad­der truth: If you’re bor­ing in real life, you’re prob­a­bly more so on Twit­ter. If you’re an idiot in real life and have idi­otic thoughts, Face­book sta­tus and Twit­ter just makes it eas­ier for the rest of the world to real­ize this …which I guess in it of itself isn’t a bad thing. Then I can weed the idiots out of my life a lot faster. It use to take a while to fig­ure out if a girl was a snotty clingy psy­cho. Now I can just look at her sta­tus his­tory and I’ll know in moments she’s psy­cho when she has post like, “What is love? Will I ever know it? Why are all the guys I date 8554o735?” or “I was out­side his apart­ment again last­night. He says she’s his sis­ter but I know he’s lying.”

But despite hav­ing it’s upshots, like the exam­ple men­tioned above, as well as hav­ing a few inno­v­a­tive and pro­duc­tive ways to use Twit­ter, most won’t know how to use it prop­erly and they will unfor­tu­nately over­whelm those who do. The mes­sages of busi­nesses like Dell and Kogi BBQ will only be a whis­per on the Twit­ter­scape drowned out by the noise of the illit­er­ate masses vying for our atten­tion. In fact, it would serve a busi­ness like Kogi bet­ter to have an API on their web­site that updated their cur­rent loca­tion than risk get­ting lost in #Kogi hell on Twit­ter with a bunch of crap reviews and unin­tended com­ments. Actu­ally, they should already be doing that right now. For proof, just search #sxsw and you’ll get more  “No, I’m not wear­ing green and no, you may not pinch me” than any sub­stan­tial news. And these are sup­pose to be the pros!

To me, the only ray of hope is Face­book. The new Face­book UI is meant to be more like Twit­ter, and that’s smart. Because a site ded­i­cated to tweet­ing alone isn’t inter­est­ing enough to keep my atten­tion. Look at Friend­ster, it was about degrees of seper­a­tion. If it just stayed as that, no one would go there any­more. It had to evolve and that’s what Face­book is doing with its new fron­tend.  And as soon as Face­book offers the best fea­tures of Twit­ter, there will be no real use to tweet. Not only does Face­book offers so much more fun­tion­al­ity than Twit­ter, Face­book has way too big a lead on users for Twit­ter to make a dent. I already intro­duced peo­ple to Twit­ter by telling them it was like a stream of Face­book sta­tuses, it just makes sense for Face­book to take over the Twit­ter world. Do I sense another buy out attempt? Prob­a­bly not, Twit­ter should have seen this com­ing when Face­book tried to buy them out the first time. Either way, it is Facebook’s will­ing­ness to evolve and it’s abil­ity to stay on the fore­front of trends that will keep Face­book at the top of our browser history. A rev­o­lu­tion is at hand, one that started with the Guten­berg Press and that is now cul­mi­nat­ing with sites like Twitter.  Mass pub­lish­ing has been brought to the masses and just like any war, there will be col­lat­eral dam­age. It might serve us all to find a safe place to take cover until the whole thing blows over …oh who am I kid­ding, look to the right of your screen at the blue box and click the icon that says “Follow”.

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1 comment for this entry:
  1. violet

    Nice post.

    Here are some points you did NOT cover:

    1. Busi­nesses are cur­rently cream­ing over Twit­ter. They use it as a way to human­ize them­selves, mar­ket research (as more peo­ple begin to use it) and as a cus­tomer ser­vice plat­form. More busi­nesses are doing this and will con­tinue to do so. Con­sumers expect busi­nesses to be trans­par­ent and Twit­ter helps them achieve this.

    2. A plat­form like Twit­ter is a way for peo­ple to posi­tion them­selves strate­gi­cally as experts.

    3. You may find Twit­ter invalu­able, but tell that to all the devel­op­ers who have built 3rd party apps for Twit­ter. Peo­ple have built a huge ecosys­tem around Twit­ter and that is what makes it valuable.

    4. Dif­fer­ent groups of peo­ple adopt Twit­ter dif­fer­ently. The fact that it is so sim­ple with an open API, allows peo­ple to do what they want with it.

    The new Face­book changes are inge­nious. They are evolv­ing as a social net­work­ing plat­form to suit the needs and desires of peo­ple as well as keep them­selves from becom­ing irrel­e­vant. If Face­book con­tin­ues to do this, they will con­tinue to reign the social web. It’s really an arms race. Friend­ster did not do this, thus it is for­got­ten while Myspace is com­pletely irrelevant.

    Twit­ter will have to make more changes before it can truly sus­tain itself, but for now, busi­nesses, early adopters, celebri­ties and peo­ple who are con­fused by Facebook’s new inter­face will jump onto Twit­ter.
    You made some good points but your post assumes that Twit­ter won’t change for the masses. Who knows? It might or it might not. But for now, peo­ple seem to not care. Like I said before, all social net­works have a lifes­pan. Their lifes­pans are extended based on whether or not they can evolve and I think we agree on this.

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