Microblogging with Shitter - I Mean Twitter

Excuse me for not joining the bandwagon, but the recent hair-on-fire frenzy about Twitter needs a bucket of cold water. Let's leave aside for the moment, Ashton Kutcher's inane race with CNN to be the first Twitter account with one million followers (trailed closely by Britney Spears). Let's ignore for now the empty words celebrities and millions of others spew forth each day using Twitter (the crapper analogy, as a result, is not empty). Let's forget that Twitter is virtually eponymous for meaninglessness and suspend our curiosity about whether such fast food language heralds the end of days. All of that is true, but irrelevant because it is simply obvious, and therefore already a coin of the realm.

No one can take seriously the idea that Twitter will become the vital communications connective tissue for the 21st century. Twitter Journalism? Let's be real. Can Twitter serve as an early source of information about important events such as the downing of the US Airways jet in the Hudson River or the terror attack in Mumbai? Sure. But so can cellphone cameras and text messages. Does Twitter represent, as its founders have argued, some transpersonal communications organism? Not at all, because the microblog, by definition, is incapable of communicating more than fragments of narrative, and to these fragments random aggregation, or viral repetition or call and response, can never supply coherence or meaning.

Let's be clear about two things. First, like Facebook, Twitter cannot succeed because it has no sustainable business model. Second, Twitter is not socially disruptive; it is socially destructive because it justifies the fragmentation of communication with the illusion that lots of small posts together communicate a coherent and immediate knowledge map on any particular event or subject.

Twitter recently received a new $35 million round of venture funding (from, among others, Jeff Bezos), and has now received a total of $57 million in funding, despite the fact that it has existed for three years and never earned a penny of revenue. Facebook and Google are both reported to be sniffing out the possibility of acquiring Twitter, which has experienced mind-blowingly rapid traffic growth recently, the sure sign of a bubble in the making. While no one is suggesting Twitter can support the $15 billion valuation that Facebook received for its Microsoft investment several years ago, the mania surrounding Twitter surely indicates the Web 2.0 frenzy has probably peaked.

Let's enumerate some reasons. First, Twitter has, until recently, employed only a handful of people. The company's technology is relatively simple with apparently little or no intellectual property to protect (check the USPTO search engine, Oh wise and prudent VCs, and see what patents Twitter has obtained). For this reason, the barriers to entry for this application (and let's be clear, Twitter is an application, not a platform) appear to be nonexistent. As a result, Twitter seems to be limited to advertising as a source of revenue, and will depend for meaningful advertising revenue on continued long-term and sustainable growth of its user base. This growth seems to be unlikely. In fact, the odds are that traffic and use of Twitter will eventually level off or shrink, precisely because it possesses the classic attributes of a fad.

Because its usefulness is so limited by its messaging format (the idea of microblogs), because the innate incoherence of Twitter is ultimately discombobulating and off-putting to the recipients of the "tweets", and because the self-referential satisfaction that comes from broadcasting to the world the desiderata of one's day is ultimately unsustainable (most people will quickly, if they have a brain, bore themselves to death), the popularity of Twitter is more akin to the superficial and ephemeral popularity of a Pet Rock or a a Beenie Baby than to the enduring impregnation of the culture of truly disruptive technologies such as Windows or the iPhone.

Ultimately Twitter subsists on the fallacious premise of much social media -- that people can and will invest enormous amounts of time and fragment their lives in the pursuit of voice, connection, and community that has no depth, no resonance, and no sustainability. Social media is very good at certain things. User comments on products purchased at Amazon are phenomenally useful. Blogging sites such as The Huffington Post that assume, and to some degree require, a high bar for the quality of its citizen voices, perform an incredibly valuable service on behalf of the new journalism, particularly as the old journalism issues forth its death rattle. But if most of us received Twitter posts in our email inboxes, even on an opt-in basis, we would quickly declare it to be indistinguishable from spam.

Recently, epidemiologists have learned they can rapidly identify and track flu epidemics using Google. And we may end up learning that Twitter as a communications organism can also offer similar benefits for identifying the "viral" transmission and movement of illness as well as political events, business cycles, cultural phenomena, and even environmental change. But we do not need Twitter to perform these functions, and at best Twitter can only provide very primitive signals of change or disruption, while other technologies and communications methods exist to more fully vet, call out, and confirm meaning on significant events.

At the end of the day, the problem Twitter faces is that it has no ability, and no concern, for distinguishing between what is trivial and what is important. The fact that its leading proponents and visible voices are celebrities -- simulacra of artists who have become famous largely for being famous -- is indicative of the contradiction Twitter will not be able escape -- to sustain its growth and popularity, it has to validate a Babel of voices that have not earned an audience.

Comments

[AaronZ]

Peter,

At least you're wise enough to hedge your bets. http://twitter.com/knowledgemosaic

The Twitter debates are getting as heated as gun control or abortion these days.

IMHO, Ashton Kutcher achieved a legitimate milestone last week. There's a shift underway enabled by Twitter. He definitely made a significant impact in the effort to stop malaria in terms of fundraising and awareness. The model will certainly be followed by others.

http://tweamr.com/the-bar-has-been-set-absolute-perfect-marketing-twintegration/

The surface hasn't even been scratched yet. Comparing Twitter to text messaging? Really? My recommendation would be to spruce up your Twitter profile page, follow more than 12 people and see what you discover.

[LADawson]

Your post echoes almost word for word what people said about blogging when it first showed up. Though, it seems to have found an audience. As has Twitter... though, I agree to the point that Twitter is an allegory for the attention span of most of the readers out there. You wonder why a company like Google would be interested in Twitter? Well, because people are. They're not interested buying the social network, or the software - Google programmers could buy a domain name and write a piece of software that does the exact same thing in an afternoon. They're interested buying the site visitors; the millions of hits they get every day that could be turned into other forms of revenue, for starters from ad views.

[Susie Cheng]

Great post. Thanks for sharing this article with us. It is good to know what other people get out of it. We do things for a reason.

Twitter is a platform for communication. What you communicate with it is up to you. What you get out of it is also up to you. I like twitter, because it is great ways to communicate with people I associate with, it is open space, you can a lots ot people from different places, and it is so m uch fun to be there as well.

Thanks for your article and hopefully I will read more of your article in the future.

Best regards,

Susie Cheng
www.twitter.com/susiecheng

[NicEvans]

Twitter might get you the news earlier (PirateBay verdict last week & Oracle buys Sun today) but what does that gain you compared to the time you loose following it (even with the best filters and select following)

I share your distrust of twitters lack of a business model and you are quite right about their lack of any exclusive technology.

The other fatal flaw for twitter will be that there is nothing to make users stick. Few users actually twitter through the website. there is nothing to draw us back other than the addiction that the next tweet might be THE ONE. It will soon become "this years Second Life" and we will get so sick of a constant flow of tweets about Susan Boyle etc that boredom and apathy will speed Twitter off to follow CB Radio.

[Wayne John]

I think this post only shows your lack of imagination, and a complete misunderstanding of what is arguably one of the most important services of the Internet age.

The most powerful aspect I've seen is instant word of natural disasters. When an earthquake hits, Twitter users are usually the first to know, unless you're the one feeling the ground shaking.

As Twitter becomes more mainstream, I see it becoming the platform for world alerts. Not only that, but the information comes from everyday people like myself, whom I trust more than big media outfits like Huffington Post writers.

[CrankyCurmudgeon]

The platform, my dear Twit, is the Internet. Twitter is merely an app. Clearly, you either have no imagination or you're just a numbskull. Follow someone who tweets (posts through Twitter) interesting, valuable, and concise information and links and maybe you'll see there can be value in it. Following Ashton whats-his-face or CNN (especially when done mindlessly and merely as part of a so-called contest for followers) is, for many - if not most - of us a waste of time and energy. Kind of like reading this post.

Here's the tweet that brought me to your post, absent the names of the original and subsequent posters:

RT Plenty 2 critique abt Twitter; this guy is uninformed. I'd flunk students 4 unsubstantiated claims http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-schwartz/microblogging-with-shitte_b_188816.html from

[CrankyCurmudgeon]

PS - I hope you're right about the Web 2.0 frenzy peaking, though clearly not for the reasons you've mistakenly stated. Perhaps now we will get down to creating the connectivity, collaboration, and multi-path participation Web 2.0 design concepts portend; what Tim Berners-Lee expected the WWW to become. May I suggest you check out Tim O'Reilly's seminal document on it. It's called "What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software". It's located at:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

[Yu-kai -Chou]

OK. I was going to post a long comment but I Just realized that there's only a 250 word limit for comments. I guess I'll post the rest on yukaichou.com...

Just to still have some content here, here's one of the things I disagree with:

I think your logic is not correct when you said Texting and Cellphone Cameras can also report headline news on the spot. First of all, saying "something else can do this too" by no means discredit the quality of the service in mind. When cellphone cameras came out, would you also say, "Normal cameras can do this too" if you were not biased against cellphone cameras? Probably not. Also, I can tell you that Twitter reports these news much better and faster than the 2 alternatives you mentioned. If you see a shocking event, you might text it to your 10 friends. These 10 friends will respond "No way! Are you ok?" And then tell their friends that's sitting next to them.

Now you can try to beat news reporters in broadcasting shocking news to the world by texting and taking pictures on your camera, but I suspect it would be an uphill battle.

[Matthew Alexander]

I hated twitter. I thought Twitter was dumb. So I joined it, figuring I better at least try it first so that I could say how dumb it was and have my opinion count for something. Then upon joining, my opinion changed. I follow experts in their fields who know what they're talking about and share links to interesting articles across the net that I wouldn't have been able to find on my own. I do not follow my friends because they have nothing interesting to say. For me it is like a homepage, my own personalized RSS reader. This isn't understood by columnists such as yourself who focus on the follower counts and vanity aspects of the service. People in this thread have said: It is what you make of it. Couldn't agree more. Twitter search is also a groundbreaking tool. I work in the news and use it A LOT. I do not want social media to take over mainstream media. You are right. That would be dangerous. But to not give Twitter its due, is in my opinion, uneducated.

[db]

People who focus on Followers at Twitter are idiots. The value comes from who you follow, not who follows you. Of course, the uninformed media, once again, focus on the popularity contest and not the substance. If you don't like Kutcher, or Britney, or whoever, just ignore their feeds. Duh.

[Robby Hill]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-schwartz/microblogging-with-shitte_b_188816.html

This is an interesting article about Twitter and is very thought provoking!

I make money building and marketing ethanol plants and not a single piece of our equipment is patented and I'm a law school graduate. We don't do fancy accounting tricks or make our customers sign contracts either. In fact, we sell everything on an invoice. Why you might ask? Because I'm a veteran of several failed start up companies. The lawyers and accountants got rich and the partners and their productive employees got screwed. From a business perspective, it makes no sense for a solid start up with zero or few competitors to start applying for patents or switch their accounting method from cash to accrual. What makes Twitter and my companies USA Ethanol 1 http://usaethanol1.comm) and Red Line Documents http://redlinedocs.comm) unique is the way they do business. My companies take a different approach to building a community and providing great customer service.

I enjoy microblogging on Twitter, but I also do serious writing at Revolution Magazine http://bolivarian-revolution.blogspot.comm). Twitter wasn't meant to be serious journalism. The advantage of Twitter is the way you use it to promote your more serious work. It's a great way to summarize your work and attract new clients and fans who may not share your passion for the details. If you're not taking Twitter seriously, you're too old!

[Stuart Burns]

Just one other thing. I think that your experience of Twitter also depends on whether you access the service through its website or a client. The Twitter website isn't particularly user friendly which is why I didn't use the service for a quite a while. Then I download Twirl then Tweetdeck and it's almost a whole different application with its categories and search tools.

[Alwaysrightneverwrong]

I didn't tweet a link of this to my thousands of followers because it doesn't meet my standards of decency because of the headline.

[Alwaysrightneverwrong]

A couple of things. The first is that it doesn't matter what the author thinks. Twitter has been very good for my business and me personally. Second, I am most worried about inane blogs taking over real journalism to the point where there are no real professional journalists left to help us govern the policitcal environment. What deserves more objective criticism is blogs replacing journalism, not Twitter inventing a new way to link like minded people to content.

How do you think I found this drivel about Twitter?

[Edwin Perello]

Twitter is barely different than Google, Yahoo, or any other aggregator. The primary difference between those and Twitter is Twitter is a real-time aggregator of data from the user's mind. It can be the simplest, silliest thought but it may be entertaining to someone; it may be intelligent and thought-provoking; it may be simply a link to an article, like a true info aggregator would be doing.

Google reader, nor iGoogle, tries to connect with you in some sort of deep moment of revelation and affection; Twitter isn't about that, either. It is the reaching out of a hand into the midst of chaos that is the Internet. When it connects to someone - when someone finds an interest in that tweet / hand - there can be a connection - or a utilitarian subscription to an aggregator. It all depends on how much you want to connect with people.

To expect a deep, personal connection with someone over an Internet medium is foolish from the offset. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. aren't there to connect with people themselves - they're there to communicate and network with individuals who might be people you want to further a relationsh­ip/friends­hip with. You have to give something into it before you can possibly expect anything out of it. If you already connect with people via blog posts, then you have no need for Twitter. Even the entire Internet is not for everyone.

[CrankyCurmudgeon]

Facebook has allowed me to connect with family members I would not ordinarily see but once a year at the holidays. Twitter has allowed me to share information with classmates. It has also proven useful for small project teams who are not co-located to inform each other of the completion of activities of their whereabouts - if that's relevant to increasing the efficiency and effectiveness. Somehow, this post (not your comment) seems a bit like sour grapes.

[Russell Bishop - Huffpost Blogger]

Hi Peter:

thanks for this post. I just put one up myself this morning on the social networking phenomenon http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-bishop/irrational-connection-alw_b_188577.htmll), the theme of which is "always connected, never connecting­."

I think there are multiple layers to this issue. As some have pointed out, there can be micro uses for which Tweets are quite workable. On the other hand, something that just about all social networking sites have in common is the theme of connection which implies actually connecting.

If connection means finding someone who knows someone who knows something about something, then these sites probably fill the bill. However, if, as I suspect, the allure is to create real connection and communication, to provide something of substance and meaning, then I think these will all become somewhat empty shells over time.

There's an intersection between commercial value and connection, but it's just an intersection, not the entire map. Unfortunately, too many people have confused the intersection with the destination.

Thanks again for stirring the pot. (bad pun intended)

[Sioen]

Actually, some of us -- many of us -- have, indeed, found real connection with real meaning in social networking tools.

The nice part about the new media revolution is that we the people are free to find and decide that value for ourselves. We don't have to wait for a few old white guys in editors' or producers' offices to tell us whether there's real meaning there or not (and so often, they're wrong about it anyway).

Value and meaning isn't up to you to determine, or anyone else. That's for the people who use the tools. I, for one, am quite thankful for them and the revolution in communication that they represent.