I’ve been using Twitter a lot over the last couple months and I’ve come to a few conclusions.
First, although Twitter has many similarities to an instant messaging app–in that people can use it to send and receive short messages with their friends and family–it’s not really one. Why? Not exactly because of how it’s implemented, but rather how it is used. IM is more of a terse conversational tool. Twitter is more like a 10-second limited megaphone. People most often use it to broadcast short bits of info. There really are few conversations going on within it.
So in practice Twitter may have more to do with micro-blogging than anything else. In fact, quite a few people broadcast announcements about what they’re blogging or broadcasting. Yep, there’s that megaphone phenomena again.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t mind the megaphone approach to Twittering. I often click on links people post. That could be just me, but it would be interesting to know how the numbers pan out. My guess is that people click on only a few of the many links posted and those that are popular are probably from well-followed Twitterers. So if you’re thinking that you would do well to use Twitter to gain attention about what you’re doing, think again. It probably won’t.
Twitter’s popularity and API has also lead to a bit of an impending mess. There are more and more sites that are aggregating Twitter content that if you Google for something that you know is unique on Twitter (try Googling for thredr, for instance which I’ve mentioned a few times on Twitter) you’ll find lots of duplicate content. This is rapidly devaluing the content.
Also on the spamming side, there are more and more “fake” Twitterers using the service. These people or bots are interested in promoting some product or other. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of Spitters (SPam twITTER) keeps going up to the point that we’ll track who’s following us with about as much gusto as watching trackbacks on our blogs.
Along these lines, if a person wants to follow me, I often check them out to see if I want to follow them too. The Spitters know this. But I’m getting more cautious with whom I check. I don’t want to give the Spitters the pleasure of even checking their info–whatever it is.
This brings me to another issue: What affect does the followers/following ratio have with what I think about someone on Twitter. If I’m interested in specific content that a person Twitters about, then the ratio means nothing. However, if it’s someone I don’t know, but a person I’m interested in broadly following, I’m more apt to pay attention to them (at least for awhile) if their followers list is large. The following number doesn’t mean too much too me at this point. However, if their following number is very high and the followers number is small, then I’m very unlikely to follow them. A small ratio like this makes me wonder if they’re setting up to spam people.
Finally, I’ve blogged in the past about how I’d like to see Twitter add other content types besides 140 character messages. It would be great to see images, audio, video, ink and the like. But how might this affect the quality of Twitter and how people use it? Overall I think it would help make Twitter more valuable–at least to me. I live in more than a text world and I’m not a heavy text messaging user. I realize that many others see it differently and admire the lowest-common-denominator nature of Twitter. These other content types could lead to some problems though if the Spitters take over, but in some ways I’d rather see the content than tiny links that I don’t know where they go to. The key here is that for the most part the people I follow I trust in terms of the content they publish.
