Comments on: The End of a Trend

By: globalcleantech

globalcleantech — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:51:00 +0000

You are right – twitter is over time and will be crashing in 2010. The really important thing is Cleantech and the Clean Energy Revolution and not a tool like Twitter. They don't create cash! ByebyeTwitter

By: michellegreer

michellegreer — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:36:07 +0000

I respectfully disagree with this post.

There is no empirical evidence that traffic to Twitter or Twitter usage is in decline:
http://www.nickburcher.com/2009/03/twitter-demo...

In terms of Twitter lists, whenever a new technology comes out, people play with it. People are just poking around with lists to see what they are capable of at the moment. This happens with any new technology, web or otherwise. People will eventually learn to leverage lists and then they can be very powerful.

If you do not see value in Twitter or Twitter lists, go to listorious.com and see all of the lists that apply to your areas of expertise. You have to consider the source, but I see a tremendous potential in grouping people by tags or interest.

You just have to be more proactive in finding the people who can provide value to what you want to hear about. If you are into the semantic web, here are a few lists right off the bat you can chose from:
http://listorious.com/rockstarin86/semanticweb
http://listorious.com/alisohani/semanticweb

Here are tech startups:
http://listorious.com/Scobleizer/tech-startups
http://listorious.com/marshsutherland/boston-st...
etc etc. there are many of these on Listorious

By: sfrancis

sfrancis — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 06:01:55 +0000

Really good thought-provoking post!
My thoughts, numbered to match up with your points:
1. Most twitter users rarely if ever use the homepage. Its okay if it bores me as a result – I'm a tweetdeck user so far. I only use the website when, for some reason, I can't use tweetdeck. Agreed twitters features are a bit of a yawn lately.
2. The kids were never using twitter. Point is, this hasn't changed, its just always been the case. It turns out, the influence of kids on technology is dramatically overstated because every generation of journalists fresh from journalism school and entering the ranks of Fortune Magazine likes to write how much smarter and tech-savvy their generation is than the previous generation. When it comes to familiarity with technology, the earlier in life you interact with it, certainly the easier it is for you. But twitter wasn't around when these kids were growing up: ) Besides… the value of “networking” and “social network” tools like Twitter, don't have much value to people who don't have a network (yet), and don't see much value in building/maintaining their network. This is the same reason that kids in highschool don't use linkedIn, but I wouldn't consider it a problem for linkedIn's business model.
3. Twitter is definitely going to have to jump on the spammers. But this is true of every platform I've ever used. Email, FB, Twitter, Blogs, RSS feeds – they're all pretty subject to abuse from spammers, and twitter (and its clients) haven't perfected how to eliminate the benefit of spam to the spammers. For example – collapse all identical tweets and just show me a count of the tweets that have substantially the same content. Give me a place to click to see all the posts individually for that topic. One of my saved searches is a space IBM likes – they post about 100 times a day with that hashtag, and the posts are 100% identical. That's not good marketing, that's just brain dead use of a platform. So I filter my search to eliminate anyone with “IBM” in the name…

4. As for the jerks taking over… this just has nothing to do with twitter and everything to do with people (and jerks having cell phones that take pictures… and mms or twitter or facebook those pictures… ) I imagine lawmakers could help out with this by giving people the rights to their own image whenever they are identifiable rather than anonymous. Instead, current law gives all the rights to the photographer… not only is twitter not to blame for such behavior, it isn't to blame at all. I can point you to about a million websites that are clearly put up by jerks We just need people to have more… humanity.

I started out as a huge skeptic of twitter. I'm still lukewarm on it. I agree with you that twitter can and should do much more to make the service useful/relevant/less-annoying. Today's announcement of the partnership with linkedIn though makes perfect sense. I use twitter for almost strictly work-related purposes, and linkedIn serves the same purpose for me – so they're highly complementary in that sense. Different tools have different purposes, and twitter may well get subsumed by something else (it seems almost inevitable given how relatively open the api is and how easy it is to subjugate it to other interfaces/applications… but it hasn't happened yet)

By: Drew Childress

Drew Childress — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:21:30 +0000

Twitter too shall pass – hopefully soon. I experimented with it for about 2 nanoseconds and then abandoned my account.

By: Joseph Miller

Joseph Miller — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:15:57 +0000

If businesses & marketers don't get a return out of Twitter, they will leave.

If the users get burnt out on an environment where they exist side by side with marketers, they will leave.

If the scales don't significantly tip either way, Twitter will hum along for the near term future regardless of it's location relative to any sharks, with it's worst case scenario being MySpace 2.0 with a flat userbase and limited future and it's best case being a highly monetizable platform with a relatively 'marketing receptive' audience.

I think your point #3 is the strongest threat to Twitter's existence, but the future is unwritten.

By: Carla Thompson

Carla Thompson — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:47:55 +0000

Hmm, interesting question Jordan. It's an aspect I didn't really explore in the post, is it?

I don't think it's a numbers issue, as in my theory won't be validated until Twitter users decline. It's instead a question of who those users are. If anything, the number of people using Twitter will only grow but I expect they will be marketers, spammers, and other types of charlatans. In its current state, Twitter is tailor-made for traveling salesmen, so to speak.

One of two things is going to happen, nay is guaranteed to happen: another technology will come along that one-ups Twitter, allowing people the same type of instantaneous communication but with more security and value-add. The smart folks will start leaving and you'll notice because your feeds will grow decidedly more junky.

And some person and/or company is going to take all of Twitter's valuable data and do something actually useful with it. Think for a minute of all that information just lying fallow on Twitter's servers...

So while there isn't a single trigger that's going to allow me to crow, "Told you so," there will be signs that are relatively easy to spot. And by that time, everyone will have forgotten I wrote this and link to Arrington instead. ; )

By: Jordan Muela

Jordan Muela — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:56:37 +0000

What exactly would need to happen for you to feel that this theory was validated?

By: Tweets that mention The End of a Trend | AustinStartup -- Topsy.com

Tweets that mention The End of a Trend | AustinStartup -- Topsy.com — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:25:02 +0000

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