Thursday, March 17, 2011

Twits, Tweets, & The Future!

Unless you've been under a rock for the last few years, I'm willing to bet someone has asked you if you use Twitter. If not, you've at least heard of it.

For those few of you remaining who don't know much about it other than the icon on your favorite websites, this is Twitter in a nutshell. It's a microblog. Essentially, a user gets 140 characters to express something that then goes out into the ether of the web. A user collects followers who receive and hopefully read the messages called "Tweets" while in turn seeking others to follow and read their tweets.

Here's the good. Twitter was designed to be used on standard mobile phones so it does not require a data package. Creating and sending a post is as simple as sending a text. In fact, that's all that's necessary. It can be sent from there to update Facebook. This allows a user to create status updates from anywhere. That's a real plus.

One thing I will say about Twitter is that it does an excellent job of driving web traffic. Putting a link in a tweet is an almost sure-fire way to send people to the site. The results are far better than anything seen on Facebook, MySpace, or other social media. I've done experiments with this. I compared days I put one of my domains in a tweet. For three months, I alternated using Facebook alone to promote a page with sending one tweet with the link. The results were staggering. On the Twitter days, traffic was an average of three times the number of unique visitors of the Facebook only days. The reason I did it for so long was to allow for some variation for the subject matter of the tweets. Results were consistent when averaged.

When Iran was descending into chaos, Twitter was the only source of news getting out of the country. Media sources relied on tweets from the people to find out what was happening. By it's very nature, it's hard to shut down or block without shutting down all mobile communication and internet providers.

Twitter is not without its weaknesses. If you start to follow a lot of people it takes all day to read all the tweets to see the one or two out of the whole list worth reading. This is especially true since tweets are usually even more mundane than Facebook status updates tend to be. Very few of these microblogs are actually worth reading. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say this: I don't care about Ashton Kutcher's hair.

I quick glance at the top users list should be enough for anyone to figure out who really uses the service. In the top twenty, only President Obama (#4) and CNN (#19) have even the slightest chance of providing useful information. The rest of the list is mostly drawn from our cult of celebrity worship. I really doubt that anyone over sixteen really cares what Lady GaGa or Justin Beiber (numbers 1 and 2 respectively) have to say in their tweets.

That said, I've seen a huge gap in regular Twitter users. The generation you most likely guessed would be the heaviest users, young twenty-somethings, are among the smallest groups. When asked, most of them see it as useless. To tell the truth, I don't entirely disagree with them. With mobile technology getting better and cheaper by the day, a text-based media is just not that useful for most people. Why use Twitter to update Facebook when you can update it directly from your phone without the character limitations?

That may be the death knell for Twitter. Smart phones are increasing in use plus the growth of extremely portable notepad computers is eliminating the need for text-based media. I don't think it will happen overnight, but I can see the beginning of the end. It will not be many years from now when Twitter will go the way of MySpace and begin to fade into obscurity.

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