Has what looked like a great service, populated by eager early adopters with like motivations turned into a service polluted by egotists, marketeers and spam artists? Larry Bodine, questioning the value of Twitter as a marketing tool for lawyers, thinks so:
I’ve learned that it is a shouting post for relentless self-promoters, a dumping ground for press releases and advertising, a competition to amass followers, and a target for computer-automated Tweets.
It was not initially thus, but Twitter is a victim of its own success. Should we be impressed by the headlines that proclaim 20 million Twitter users and growing at 1,382% p.a.? More is not better. It’s no wonder that 60% don’t contribute after a month, for if the signup is so easy, subsequent inactivity is much more likely.
Knock off that 60% and we have 8 million active Twitter users. That’s a sizeable number, but that does not make Twitter mainstream and talk of Twitter replacing RSS is frankly ludicrous. And if 90% of all Twitter activity is by 10% of users, that gives us only 2 million users worldwide who fully embrace it. That’s not going to change the world, much as that minority would like it to.
I’ve a soft spot for Twitter. I’m still in there, though somewhat remotely. I’d like to be able to engage with it more, but it seems to me that if everyone can join and tweet about anything, only the dedicated will find value and that takes time which may be better spent elsewhere.
OK, I don’t have to follow the noise makers, but that’s not the point. Most of us don’t need yet another inbox to filter. We’d like a bit of focus, something that sorts the wheat from the chaff and delivers a more immediately useful service. Various Twitter apps and judicious use of Twitter Search and hashtags will turn up the goodies, but many wonder why Twitter hasn’t itself organised the Twitter stream. Will that only come after a Google takeover?
Recent stats suggest the party may be over but that’s not a bad thing if that explosive growth was fuelled by hype:
Twitter is normalizing. It’s no longer a new frontier, an elite club or a culture-transforming medium. It’s just a service for sending messages. …
Twitter is appealing to people with something to sell, or people who want to network professionally. It’s also a great way to follow a hobby or intellectual interest. In other words, it’s for older people, mainly.
So is Twitter dead? Far from it. But the Twitter hype bubble has surely burst (thanks, Oprah!). Now those of us who actually get value from it can enjoy it with less of the hype, expectation and noise than we’ve been seeing in the past few months.
