A lot of negative stuff has been attributed to Twitter this week. Stephen Fry threatened to quit the platform after being called boring, Danyl on X Factor got likened to Hitler and, on a personal note, someone sent me a direct message asking me to Retweet something and saw their arse when I didn’t. And that’s just the stuff that came to my attention.
I like Twitter and I’ve got a lot from it (and continue to do so) but I do believe it’s success and the ease of which anyone can join and say anything will ultimate lead to it’s downfall. There’s no self-sensorship.
Although often pitted against Facebook as competition, I can’t see a long-term future for Twitter. If anything Twitter highlights everything that is wrong with user generated content.
Twitter content is in the general domain. Anyone can say anything and everyone can see it. At least Facebook works in a closed environment which offers a sense of self-policing.
Twitter users come in all shapes and sizes and some have a lot less to lose than others and ultimately, those people and their loose tongues will turn the tide of support for Twitter as a valid social platform.
I won’t stop using Twitter, and I won’t stop suggesting to certain clients that they get in the mix, but, I can see the way I use it change a lot. Less is more. Quality not quantity because yes, I do spout a lot of crap too.
Right, post to Blog then Tweet 
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree with your comments.
Personally, I’m on twitter to find useful information and also find out what people are up to. I’m not on there to receive other people’s spammy marketing messages for example.
I think the answer is in some kind of “reputation management system”. This is analogous to Google’s Page Rank, but is probably derived from a Digg.com-like system of voting.
This should allow quality tweeters and tweets to be recognised and filtered.
Good suggestion Simon. Thinking about it, I can’t image they are not doing this anyway. Not sure how they would measure quality though.
There are sites like Twitter Grader, etc. but a good example of why this is flawed is 2 dogs being in the top five for Basingstoke.
Great post Craig.
I’ve found myself returning to Facebook more and more often now but I don’t think we will be ditching Twitter just yet, we’ve had many profitable leads through it and met some great and diverse people from around the world.
It’s a great resource place but becoming too spammy now. I think once it became mainstream the problems really started. To survive the model is going to have to change.
Definitely too spammy Ben, especially with all these people who seemingly do the networking circuit too. Aggghhhh. I do agree with your comment about meeting a diverse bunch of people though. I’ve met some interesting people too.
Seems to me that the digg.com mechanism of “digging up” or “digging down” items would work pretty well.
An interesting improvement to this mechanism would be to incorporate a recommendation algorithm so that the “importance” of any given tweet is calculated dynamically for any given user.
For example, I like your tweet so I “vote it up” as do hopefully a number of other people.
My twitter client then takes my votes and compares them to the other votes from people in my network in order to show me the most highly voted tweets (and hide the down voted ones).
Netflix.com use a similar system for recommending film rentals (and recently awarded a $1million dollar prize in a programming competition to improve their algorithm.
The processing power requirements for doing the required calculations would be very, very significant but fortunately, we have Moores Law on our side
I’m sure there is tons of valuable information on Twitter which is currently “lost” because it is so difficult to sort the wheat from the the chaff.
Nice to see you oozing common sense as always Craig.
Don’t know if you recall, but way back when in 2000, one of my web-centric ventures (all based around behavioural data when people still said, “Eh? Wassathen?”) involved a simple ‘rate it:hate it’ system which generated 5 stars – much like eBay’s feedback.
The personal ROI was simply the fact that the more you put in, the more you got out… reciprocity rules.
The problem with any ‘easy’ public vote with low barriers to entry is you can get the ‘Jedward Effect’. Are people really engaged, and are they aware of how the outcome they influence may effect others?
At the other end of day, all relationships are based on shared experiences… and we like like-minds… so when we play nice and share we get the most out… well everything.