I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but I saw a post on how most Twitter users do not use the service, and thought I’d expand some thoughts. The majority of my friends do not Tweet. Nor does my family. They do not care about it. They see “follow us on Twitter” during TV broadcasts and don’t know why they should. Further, they are not getting more interested despite an increasing barrage of the service. If anything, they are even less intrigued to the mystique that is Twitter than ever before. Note that some of my screenshots contain vulgar language – nothing compared to Xbox Live banter, but you’ve been warned.
Here’s the “first impression” a user gets by coming to twitter:
Independent of all other things, this doesn’t really give any insight as to why people are going crazy about Twitter. If I’ve heard that Oprah and Ashton are tweeting, and my favorite football player, and it’s the latest hottest thing, and all I see is a static page with a bunch of random-seeming terms, I’m not yet compelled. Further, the major tagline “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world” isn’t exactly right. If you make a search like “how are things in haiti” you get a very bizarre set of responses that do not inherently answer the question. Knowing how to search in Twitter is important, yet isn’t taught. Showing hashtags also overly geeks up the screen, and in a bad way. To continue this “new user experience”, I clicked on “pregnancy pact” (was curious) and saw the following:
This didn’t really explain anything to me, just showed me, well, the exact type of garbage the average person does not want to be reading. It’s not even gossip/fun, it’s just *weird*. Sure there’ll be the occasional clever gem, but for the most part, especially with popular topics, it’s becoming a haven for spam or utter drivel. Also, as an aside, Twitter should not display foul language to users who aren’t logged in – some people still prefer to keep vulgarity elsewhere. It actually gets even worse if you look at trending topics:
Huh? No thanks.
Now how about the new user experience from the perspective of following someone they were “told” to follow. The @CNN account shows recent CNN headlines, as it should. However, this does not exactly “add value” to someone’s life, as finding CNN headlines is relatively easy to do. How about mega-celebrity @Oprah?
Not exactly new and interesting, and definitely not “real-time”. All we’ve learned is she seems to like Avatar, uses capital letters inappropriately, and then includes a bunch of things that look like gobbledygook. Why? Because once you do get “into” Twitter, you start using acronyms, links, and vocabulary that make texting look downright poetic. What’s a ow.ly? Who’s RT? It looks foreign and daunting. It’s as if there’s a huge “insider’s” club, and if you don’t get it, you feel awkward and alienated.
Finally, there’s looking at what happens once someone actually does sign up for Twitter and use it. They are presented a seemingly random list of “suggested” users. Following these people creates a stream of equally foreign and incomprehensible Tweets, likely about topics that aren’t interesting to anyone other than a small group, and again, in an exclusionary, not inclusionary, manner. Trying to catch the eye/ear of others is near-impossible, and building a following outside one’s small social circle is unlikely to occur. More stats:
The average Twitter user has 27 followers, which is down from 42 followers in August, according to the new study. About 25% of users have no followers at all; that’s up from 20% with no followers last August. Upward of 40% of users only have one to five followers.
So what should Twitter do about it?
This is the million billion dollar question. The company is already in danger of reaching the backlash phase inevitable in modern society (get too big/successful and you become the enemy, deservedly or not – see Starbucks, Google, Wal-mart, etc). Some say it’s already started. I don’t think so, as I think we haven’t even come to the point where people care yet. That said, my non-Twitter “regular world” friends are already telling me they’re tired of the inundation of “follow us on Twitter” they see during TV shows, Web sites, etc. This is a problem, and Twitter must solve it to get as big as they want to be – otherwise this whole thing will get outed as a “early adopter only” toy, and valuations will come crashing down. And if it starts to crash, even a little bit, it probably won’t recover – nobody wants to hang out in the club that was cool 3 years ago, but only your dad goes to now.
In my opinion, Twitter needs to thoroughly overhaul the new user experience. Forget “suggested users” and focus on “suggested uses“. Part of the reason the media like Twitter so much is it is actually useful for doing their job. They can publicize their content rapidly and directly, can interact with both readers and companies, and make reporting/blogging/journalism a component of how they use Twitter. For celebrities, be they Web-only or real ones, it’s good for personal branding not to mention a nice ego-feed. For events which occur in real-time (Hudson plane crash, Haiti earthquake, elections, etc) it’s a good way of finding out information as it occurs (though obviously fraught with error and rumormongering).
Notice how we’ve still ruled out “normal people living normal lives”? There’s zero relevance to the average person who wants to live in private. Even as they dabble at lifecasting, there’s no reward, as the game logic to using Twitter is fundamentally broken. Unlike FourSquare, or new site TheSixtyOne, there is no form of achievement system. If anything, you are measured up against people with millions of followers, a completely unattainable goal. Here’s the opposite: the very first thing I saw on thesixtyone:
Even though the above shot has some confusion, it’s so much closer to telling me something to do, how to do it, and how I benefit from it. Twitter could easily do the same: “find 10 sports figures (or bands or politicians, etc) and follow them” or “retweet (RT) three people with less followers than you” etc. This system could scale up pretty high, and create a much more interesting hierarchy for the “twitterati” as well.
The folks at Twitter are clearly smart (and yeah, they got a little lucky along the way, but that’s part of being smart IMHO), and clearly know they need to do something, and soon. Twitter needs to be able to positively convert new users into active users, and absolutely must work on the “why do I care what someone’s having for lunch?” reputation the site has. I believe an achievement type of system that rewards “good behavior” is the right way to do it (not to mention major user interface/experience overhauls). As it stands now, I’ll return to my prior conviction that Twitter has not proven themselves as a viable platform, and must still navigate extremely well and carefully to be the billion dollar company everyone wants them to be.
This is the 2nd blog post I have read today on the backlash to Twitter. Interesting perspective Jeremy. I too am the only one on twitter in my family. The sad thing was last summer my 16 yr old signed up, but didn’t get it. That there is a more telling sign – when the younger generation dismisses it. Should be interesting to see what the smart people at Twitter do to re-engage their momentum.
Good news on all of this is that they have all the freebie advertising now. Even my local news stations here in St. Louis have jumped on the bandwagon and are all on Twitter. 🙂
Great, thoughtful article Jeremy. I agree 100 percent.
As a journalist, I’ve found Twitter an amazing source of leads. It’s all in WHO you follow and who follows you. I can’t believe the news I want now comes to me directly,
Regards,
Sue McPhail, APR
Ideaology
suemcphail@twitter
I concur the fact that younger generations are not buying into it. I teach 17-22 year olds in tech/media and also evangelize Twitter frequently (for one thing, the board of directors wants to know more about Twitter/social networking and they want to hear it from students). They just don’t buy it, though. They don’t “get it”. I do agree, too, that Twitter is at the make-or-break point. It’s territory ripe for overuse, misuse, and has great potential for becoming irritating. Personally, I think if it becomes even more mainstream, it will fail because it will be so quickly filled with useless detritus.
It seems in general the most Twitter users will be experienced users on the web. Journalists, bloggers, online marketeers, etc, etc…..
New users are signing up a lot i think, based on all the TV commercials and website banners, but they are NOT helped by finding the REAL true additional value of twitter. Before the twitter guys will think of helping users to sign up, try to give users a GOOD manual AFTER signing up, with GOOD examples of REAL stories, i guess that would help A LOT in the first place. Getting tons of users is not really interesting, getting thousands of users who get the grip on the Valus would be more interesting.
GREAT STORY!! I do totally agree.
yeah, I worry that Twitter just feels like alot of people pushing their message and not alot of conversational value. That’s really bad long term because then it feels like spam and no one pays attention to your message ’cause they get too many. It really needs to be more conversational with longer message length. Right now sort of feels like you’re talking into space.
Jermey,
Great Post- Being a marketing nutjob, Twitter needs to get a professional marketer on board- who is calling those shots? Google could do simple to search- but Twitter is tougher. They need to use their own tool and crowdsource from so many great pros on Twitter to help them get their prospects to that ah-ha moment most of us Twitter mega-users get..me I signed up used for a short time came back to it about 2 months later and then it happened to me.
I have had to walk hand in hand with so many friends to get it-but when they do, it just a hoot to watch them do the same. On the younger gen, my 18yr daughter thinks it old folks stuff LOL and she is like so many of her group-FaceBook Mavens to the Max.
Scoble just told Twitter to listen up they should..
…if we define “normal folks” as marginally literate, resistant to learning anything new since they’re now out of the formal education system, and incapable of paying attention to something for more than an hour at a time, then yes, “normal people” will not get Twitter. Or opera, Or baseball, unless they grow up with it.
Twitter does require new linguistic skills, the ability to condense a communication into a very tiny space, and the willingness to bear with something while not understanding it completely at the beginning.
As someone who invested that time I can tell you that many folks who use Twitter vigorously are also marginally literate, resistant to learning in many ways, and often attention deprived.
But I can also say that by using the proper tools and by communicating in ways that are effective in the medium, I not only get tremendous value from what I find by reading, but I experience value from the time I spend saying things on Twitter. And the platform has already reached critical mass, so I don’t perceive the need to entice “normal folks” to participate in the conversation.
A willingness to learn is required, and that helps people self-select in a way that serves me. Who is there is who needs to be there, who wants to be there, and who has invested their time and attention to find out how to be effective.
Yes, there is spam, clutter, and vulgarity. But I learned long ago how to filter that in a way that leaves it below my radar. In my world Twitter doesn’t have those things because they don’t reach me. People who learn how to use Twitter find it to have value, and people who don’t want to learn are best advised that it isn’t for them. No harm, no foul.
Great stuff Jeremy. You’re right the use-case scenario is the one that wins the day on Twitter. I was helping teach volunteer writers for a local online pub how to tweet for the upcoming winter games. We (the vancouverobserver.com) wants to have our cadre of writers tweet from the city and report what’s going on.
I told the group don’t sign up because it’s cool. Sign up because you can get, gather, and transmit a lot of information to a lot of people very, very quickly through Twitter. It took a while, but most folks got it.
I don’t think anyone is really “normal”, there are lots of potential use cases for lots of different folks, we just have to help define what those use cases are.
Maybe Twitter is like getting email was not long ago?
I really don’t see the value in real time search. “See what people are saying now about…” who cares? Is that a daily common use case for any large number of people? Certainly its cool to get the buzz factor on something, but that’s more of a cool factor, not a real consumer need.
Great post Jeremy. Certainly true for me that my “regular” friends don’t get Twitter at all and are in no rush to figure it out. But even for those of us that do get it and use it semi-regularly – there is even another questions which is how to use Twitter regularly and still get anything else done. It’s the ultimate tool for the Continuous Partial Attention problem. In order to engage in real time conversation, you have to drop whatever else you were trying to focus on. This may work for people whose job it is to use Twitter all day, like social/community managers, it sure doesn’t for the rest of us…. Interesting to see whether Twitter goes the way of Second Life, blogs/RSS, or Facebook. Note that blogs/RSS still haven’t penetrated the mainstream for the most part but still allow for a sizeable marketplace for related companies like WordPress, SixApart, etc.
Here’s the thing. Twitter & Facebook, social networking sites, connect people – real people. Your title asks “Will Normal Folks Ever Use Twitter?” Well, see, here’ thing..what you read on twitter are normal folks. They share the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you want high brow, read the NYT’s. Hey, I do. Still, it’s so nice to have a place to connect with others, share, learn, and discover the insights in a person’s daily life. My tip – join in. Tweet. Then, you’ll find out while millions do to. :0)
Great article. I’ve been in the business of creating internet services since 1995 and I think Twitter needs to sit up and take notice of one principle I’ve seen many times and that is “you can design a product/service but your users will determine how it’s used.” As a “normal person” I had no use for Twitter (and still don’t) but it is an amazing marketing tool.
Twitter needs to embrace this fact and improve the site to better support what people are actually doing rather than what they want people to do 🙂
lots of great comments so far, thanks! – a few responses:
@NWestGirl – if you really think about it, we’re all “normal folks” – the point I’m making is the average user, new to any Twitter experience, is rejecting it…
@Ron – good point re “continuous partial attention”. i was thinking about… ooh.. shiny object… ooh… huh? 😉
@Tris – i don’t agree re Email as a comparison, but need to put better thought into explaining why – will get back to you. Go Habs.
@Vincent – I think your comment effectively *makes* my point.
Those who are new to Twitter (as in new, meaning signing up within the last 2 years), don’t realize, in the beginning the service was used mainly by bloggers who wanted to share their sites and find others who had similar interests. Finding people to follow wasn’t difficult-and following back those who followed you didn’t involve making sure they weren’t bots or self-proclaimed “experts.” The biggest problems Twitter has faced as of late- the inability, (or not wanting) to connect to the very users who made the service what it is today. If a person doesn’t understand Twitter- I can see why- the site basically tells you “follow these people,” without the option of searching by interests. What we end up with- people with millions of followers, whom they could care less about, little connecting and more promoting. Unless they rethink the direction they want Twitter to go- “normal” people will never understand the hype. (I’ve been on Twitter 3 years and I’ve grown tired of the lack of direction).
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There’s definitely a barrier to entry with Twitter and it is being able to get over the “What the heck is this thing” portion of the experience. I’ve been a marketer for the past 8 years and recall stumbling across Twitter tweets while doing Web searches and I had no idea what was going on. It looked like a community of some sort with a bunch of “tw” baby talk. It wasn’t until Seth Godin mentioned Twitter for the gazillionth time that I finally (in early ’08) jumped in and started swimming around. I had been using other social networking sites for several years before so that aspect wasn’t unique.
But once I got in and figured out the basic mechanics and conversed with friends already on it, I could see the incredible power of it. The things that are going on are transforming our society – world news, politics, local issues, biz/marketing, spirituality, and more.
There may be a cultural moat around Twitter keeping a few folks out, but there’s a whole world inside that is thriving, growing, and in its infancy. Imagine what can happen when it grows up?
I have used twitter for almost a year and find it not at all compelling. I listen to the knuckleheads on TWiT, et. al. gushing about it, but it just don’t see the benefit. I don’t think the problem is that it’s too tough to use, it’s more: WHO CARES?
We believe first impressions are essential and Twitter, unfortunately, mismanaged their introductory message….
allowing useless mundane tweet samples to dominate the launch : i.e. “Im at the grocery”. “Paris Hilton rocks” “Watching Jersey Shore”, etc.
This compromised the enterprise.
When we speak to our friends, few “get” any Twitter benefits because this is how they understand Twitter’s utility/value.
Agree with JesseLuna here. Twitter is young, ton’s of people are using it and its gaining traffic every day. More and more people are understanding how they can use it, and more importantly than anything posted here, is the apps, applications, and devices that are all tapping into it.
Do you know of a brand new high end techy device that does not integrate with twitter yet? My DVR (verizon fios) has had twitter for months, and now most new video games coming out can post your scores to twitter for you.
Not to put down or complain about anything, but my .02: I think that this article is a little short sighted honestly.
Now the real billion dollar question: how can twitter monetize this traffic more effectively? It will be a matter of time before they start charging for corporate accounts and/or having the ads like you see on facebook and everywhere else.
Lastly, you mention “There’s zero relevance to the average person who wants to live in private. ” You are 100% correct. Twitter (and facebook) are not meant for these types of people. Those people are less normal than what you are calling normal, imo.
Best!
Nice piece, but how exactly is being lucky “part of being smart”? This is how people justify giving too much credit where it’s not deserved.
They are smart, and got lucky. If they forget that, they are in trouble (and might not be as smart as we think, after all)
@JesseLuna – per my entire post, the point is that most users are NOT going through the moat, thus not enabling it to grow up…
@cbr – hype does not equal substance. just because a video game can post a score to twitter does not prove that people are using it, nor that they will begin to. the stats do NOT back up your position.
@valley bob – i believe some people make their own luck…
@Jeremy Toeman:
Do you have actual stats to back this up? The only stats you say in your article:
“The average Twitter user has 27 followers, which is down from 42 followers in August, according to the new study. About 25% of users have no followers at all; that’s up from 20% with no followers last August. Upward of 40% of users only have one to five followers.”
This fails to mention the growth. Example: if you have 10 users one month, and 30 users the next, those new 20 users you just got are not going to have the same amount of followers, _especially_ if the growth rate is expanding. IE – if it took you a year to get the first 10 followers, they have had a lot more time to gather friends.
Every article I can seem to mention online mentions twitters insane growth level, in recent reports it is shown that twitter’s usage internationally is sky rocketing as well.
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@cbr – read this (linked in the first paragraph): http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9148878/Twitter_now_has_75M_users_most_asleep_at_the_mouse – there are several indicators that they are not growing “well” – very high churn & dissatisfaction = bad for long term health.
and i’m not saying twitter is *shrinking* by any means – I’m stating that these kinds of stats are troubling indicators…
I think normal folks will eventually use Twitter but I don’t think they’ll contribute. We all know that real-time data has been proven to be valuable. I personally think that Twitter is kind of like Wikipedia in the sense that only hardcore contributors will keep the service alive. regular folks will use it because they’ll find it on sites that they are familiar with like Google. The discussion of “normal folks” using wikipedia wasn’t really top of mind back in the day but can anyone imagine if Wikipedia no longer existed? As long as Twitter continues to cater to their “power users”, and there are enough situated around the world, it’ll survive. I wrote a blog about this the other day.
http://andresburgos.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/twitter-is-more-like-wikipedia/
This is just my opinion.
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Best blog article I’ve read about ANY subject recently. I’m a journalist and use twitter for work only, and for two purposes only:
1) Post links to articles
2) Save searches to relevant news terms and subsribe to an RSS feed of that search. I thought this would be incredibly valuable. Turns out most of these tweets are just reposts of our own articles or similar stories.
As a personal user, can’t think of many people I would want to follow. Even if I want to follow an athlete, rock star, whatever, do I care whether they’re stuck in an airport or playing some video game?
Not to mention, following more than a few people who tweet regularly becomes incredibly time consuming to keep track of.
Maybe I’m old school, but I definately prefer the conversation style of FB to twitter. Much more personal.
Great great article.
Couple of thoughts –
Who thought information in a stream was a good idea?
Twitter by itself isn’t really that useful and doesn’t offer a lot of features, which requires add-on products…I don’t know anyone who enjoys twitter that doesn’t use a bunch of integrated products to make the experience more pleasurable – you need a separate app for your iphone, another online (echofon) or desktop (twitter, seesmic, echofon, etc)
It is hard to cut down the chatter.
There is a big learning curve – You need to understand url shorteners, how to upload photos, how to find people to follow (and separate the good ones from the spammers or people who post a million times a day), filtering out info.
Even good twitter people can be annoying…if you are following a techguy and you really like his posts and then he goes to a conference and posts every 5 seconds about each booth, new products, where they are meeting for drinks…you want to die.
Twitter really needs a way to profile people – take a brief survey and recommend some people to follow, then periodically check in to see if they like who they are following. It would also be great to have posts get reviewed so the cream rises to the top…maybe even some recommendation engine. It also should be a one stop shop…twitter should allow you to easily switch between multiple accounts, shorten urls, upload pics, etc instead of having to find multiple twitter apps…they can do this through acquisition or product development. You don’t have any really good way to find your friends who are on twitter…this should happen all the time and prompt you when someone joins. Also, is it time to expand the character limit
There are so many problems with twitter, but I use it to find out info and . I know very people who use the service and lots of people who have come and left, with either not doing much or doing nothing at all…mass adoption is a long ways away.
Jeremy:
Great article. The following little story illustrates why I think twitter isn’t resonating with ‘normal’ people.
A tweeter who has over 1900 followers posted a tweet a few days ago saying that for every RT that he got of that post, he would donate $.50 (for up to 1000 RT’s – or $500) to the Haiti relief effort through Franklin Graham’s charity. That’s it, just hit the Retweet button. No links to click, nothing to buy, he was pledging his own cash. When I saw the tweet, it was in the early evening, and the tweet had been up for about ten minutes, I figured, why not? So I clicked RT and was shocked to see that I was the only tweeter who had done so!! I checked back through the night and…nothing. The next morning, I saw that he had posted a new tweet with the same plea and pledge and it too had no RT’s.
If a person who has 1900 followers can’t get them to click a button for charity, what hope does a new user have to connect with anyone? The better question is, what does it mean to follow, or to be followed by someone, on twitter at all?
Tim
Twitter is for people who are obsessed by the value of information; who are hungry for specific kinds of knowledge, and feel compelled to find it, share it and discuss it.
that is not everyone.
I try new stuff all the time. I am 50 and love this kind of stuff… generally. However… there are just limits to value… and better e-mail… better social networking… better operating systems …are very marginal gains if any depending on my habits already learned. Twitter is just not compelling… I don’t know personally a single user. I am 50… and online plenty of places. I have two teenagers, one in HS and one in college. No one uses it. Which leaves me to believe it’s twenty somethings who are unmarried or no kids at least with time to burn and overly electrically-social. Not my crowd.. not kids crowd. Even my kids are finding texting to be getting irksome..as are their friends. This article confirms what I think I know.. while this may be cool in theory… it’s a PITA that consumes too much time for little value to the non ADD individual.
It’s the difference between introverts and extroverts.
Introverts (in this case, “normal” people) can create their own reality; extroverts (i.e. twits) need confirmation / affirmmation from the rest of the world.
Great article! I do have the same experience here in Germany. Not everyone is using Twitter, Facebook etc. cause the benefits are not clear and it takes time to get in the game.
I thought this article would tell me what are guys like me missing for not using twitter…
So I started reading the article and it was like 10 minutes before: I ain’t missing anything.
Lately I have heard a lot about twitter and my opinion is: It’s just a piece of non-innovative technology that has been successfully marketed.
Is it dying? Then let it go gracefully.
I don’t think “normal” people are interested in pregnancy pact or CNN either, but i wouldn’t dream to disagree with the overwhelming fact that they obviously are, or their links wouldn’t be on the front page of twitter. With this fact in mind, it’s quite bold of the author to claim that these twitter conversations are “the exact type of garbage the average person does not want to be reading”. That’s like walking in to a biker bar and announcing that “normal” people aren’t into wearing leather tank tops, and it’s the kind of statement that will get you a reaction.
Like e-mail, text, and phone, twitter is another form of communication. Would a “normal” person sit at home, looking at their telephone asking, “Why are you not entertaining me telephone?”. The point is that to get the best out of it, you need some good phone numbers to ring. Equally, I would imagine that if you could eavesdrop on millions of calls right now, a great deal of them would be discussing things that are not in your field of interest.
It’s best not to just turn up at the front-page, click a couple of links and go “oh, what is the point?”. Be mature. Put some thought into it. Make an effort. Find out the names of some good people on there and join in. Ask questions. Find answers.
From the scant information I now have it appears it would be better that the author sells their PC and buys a lava lamp. They could look at it. It would be shiny.
What a lot of comments. I had this issue come up last week with a lot of older learners wanting me to explain it and 2 things came up – both tellingly were about the language.
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John Doe
What’s that Twitter?
Jane Doe
I agree. I just don’t get it.
Jamie Cullam
try searching for hashtags in google or twitter e.g #brain or #ecg or #medical and you will suddenly see why twitter isnt pointless as there is a community of like minded people tweeting away in your field.
John Craven
I second this
Fred Dibner
Its like talking to a wall…or lassie.. indeed but then who wants to know about someones washing machine breaking or that they have just had a cup of tea, twitter houses the majority of people that actually have something interesting to say, just that the average facebook punter doesnt know how to go about accessing the content on twitter.
Jane Smith
Yes twitter is more like a stream of consciousness which you can listen to and dip in and out of – you can also listen for specific information or About certain people by using @ and # like Jamie pointed out. Also if you use a twitter application like TweetDeck to manage your twitter then it make much more sense and learn to use tags. It is really … See X to find out the latest information and thinking on subjects and helping you if you need to research things as you can “crowdsurf” for feedback and ideas. Also twitter has been adapted for many other uses as it is so flexible and now widely used. the website http://hashtags.org/ for example allows you to see the meems that appear on Twitter.
It also it useful as conferences or events to meet other people who are there or discuss things publicly with other people. Here are 9 ways to find people who twitter close to you … http://mashable.com/2009/06/08/twitter-local-2/
John Doe
Thats a fair point John/Jane. I have to admit, I haven’t really put much effort on learning the other uses it has!
John Smith
I, too, am old enough to find the whole thing a waste of time and effort. I don’t need another medium to read people disembowelling the English language
Jane Smith
Oh I seee … so does that make me childish and literary incompetent, or grammatically retarded, or or or harumph I’m sick of all this obsession about the English language it’s just a waste of time and effort.
Jane Smith
I wonder was my last comment sarcastic, ironic or something else?
Computer Bod
The problem with twitter is there’s nothing you can do with it you can’t do better elsewhere on the internet. If you want to research or connect with people working in medicine, it’s a safe bet you’ll get better results checking medical forums or professional websites than crowdsurfing 140 character messages from strangers who may or may not have a… See more clue what they’re talking about. If you want to meet people at conferences you can check the conference website, or even, I dunno, talk to people. Twitter’s a clumsy solution to a problem no’one’s identified
Brainiac – Successfully identified the genome responsible for MS! #brains
Neurosis666 – Really? Wow dude, props! #brains
Brainiac – Not really, gotcha LOLZ 😉 😉 😉 #brains
Neurosis666 – Ha, good one!!! MegaLOLZ #brains
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That was one conversation I have seen about Twitter on Facebook and I think it is fairly common. The other critisism of Twitter from the older generation appears to be the use of swearing, bad language or inappropriate conversations with a degrading, rasist, sexist or downright stupid tone.
I use Twitter to mine for expert and nonexpert knowledge –and to network –on two topics of interest to me personally and professionally. Those two topics are technology and e-learning. Twitter has been of great value to me in those respects. I don’t really use it socially, simply because my friends and family are not Twitter users… of course I have made new friends via Twitter. I definitely don’t follow celebrities because I don’t think I will be interested in what they tweet about. I don’t find that Twitter takes a lot of my time because I’ve figured out how to use searches and stuff to tailor to what I need. It did take me some time to figure all this out, I suppose.
Bottom line is, once I saw a specific use for Twitter — and I saw that use pretty early on — I’ve found it extremely useful. Perhaps if I were trying to use it for expert knowledge of history or literature, it might be less useful — that’s a hypothesis but I don’t know if it is so. Somehow I have over a thousand followers and I follow about that many. It just kind of happened. I did not work too hard at it. Just my 2p!
I don’t know who uses twitter, and I don’t know why.
I’ve gone to the site, after being slammed wtih twitter fanfare everywhere. After review, I didn’t bother signing up. I see *zero* value. I mean, zilch – nada. Which obviously much just be a part of my brain that either can’t or refuses to comprehend the purpose or benefit, since there are twitterers – right?
I love the images of the Twitter chatter in this article. They represent the reason behind the look of “WTF” that appears on my face everytime I stumble on some site that is publishing “related” twits. Related? Oh – cmon!
My son doesn’t use twitter, neither are his friends. No one in my family twits, or cares. None of my clients or co-workers twit. All for the same reason – “What for?”.
The whole buzz over that thing stumps me like mad.
@Vincent Lowe
You assume that normal people are people not willing to learn and thus everyone not using tweeter is a person not capable of learning.
This is a really superficial, I know a lot of people who happen to be very smart and very knowledgeable who don’t use tweeter because they believe it is not useful.
It really depends on whether you care about what people tweet about… I don’t really care about most of what people tweet about, and I find it a total waste of time since the people I care about following don’t tweet because they have better things to do….
actually, I don’t care about all the crap that people send tweeter all the time…. and I get the important news from other sources that don’t waste my time…
Bottom line, I and a lot of people won’t use tweeter till it actually offers something useful to me…
Very interesting – rings true. Sally (above) hit the nail on the head — Twitter is a “maven” enabler — ala The Tipping Point. Its true value is emergent. How many regular people learned morse code or had access to a telegraph in the years after the telegraph became widely used? Check out @twibes for a compelling emergent use.
I know a few people who use twitter, mostly for the “cool” factor. These guys are software developers and at the time Twitter was supposed to be “it”. I was even drawn into it for a few weeks.
It didn’t take very long before I deleted all my tweets and shut down my account. I found it to be mind-numbing and an utter waste of time. It’s 99.7% gibberish, consumes way too much time, and provides no value. It presents an artificial paradigm that reminds me of the old PDA’s that used grafiti for input. You had to learn another language to use the things. I greatly prefer Facebook.
I learned about twitter 3 years ago and did not get it, I again tried to do something about it and still I do not get it. Not that I do not want to learn new things, nor that I am illiterate or want to be a virtual anchoret, I am very happy of that msn and facebook do for me. I believe that Twitter is not for everyone and the people that are using it because everybody uses it will eventually leave. This is not the first internet tool that everybody talked about and suddenly had problems to gain new users or even keep the old ones. Not too long ago there were the anti windows crowd that said it was for lazy or dumb people that could not understand DOS and the power of DOS shell. Dismissing the lack of interest of the majority as ignorance or stupidity is like trying to hide the sun with a finger, the problem is there and if twitter does not provide a real reason to use it, it will soon be forgotten, because let?s face it, like everybody else, they want it to be a profitable company.
Interesting article. I think really all Twitter needs to do is figure out what those who love it love about it, and focus on showing those things to the new user. But this is difficult because what’s interesting can be very context-dependent.
A lot of what’s on Twitter looks like inane chatter only because it’s coming from total strangers. “I don’t care what somebody is having for lunch.” Well, if the someone is one of my friends (friends as in real life, not “friends” as in social networking) then it’s likely that I _DO_ care what they’re having for lunch. Maybe they’re having lunch at a restaurant I’ve been interested in trying and because I know them and what their tastes are like and trust their opinions, I want to hear what the experience was like for them. Or maybe I just like keeping up on my friends for the intangible connection aspect of it.
I don’t care to follow celebrities, and I think if anything Twitter just helps illuminate how boring, annoying, “normal” really, celebrities can really be when they’re off-stage/camera. So I think trying to convert users by pointing them to celebrities is misguided.
Beth makes a very good suggestion about being able to discover people to follow based on interests. I’m a web applications programmer and a musician, so a good chunk of the value I get from Twitter is in following — and actually conversing with — not-so-famous, but nonetheless interesting, people whom I’ve yet to meet in real life, that are involved in music and web programming, or sub-specialties thereof (bassplayers, songwriters, Ruby On Rails programmers, Emacs users). There are aspects of how Twitter works that make this easier to do there than on the more traditional social sites (Facebook, MySpace).
Even normal people are interested in something, have activities. Being able to classify users by these kinds of interests would help new users find something interesting enough to them to be worth sticking around for, not to mention be potentially valuable (as in $) data of use to marketing types.
Eric & Gerry summed it up pretty damn well. Not to put anyone down, but you can see some of the comments on this post affirming Gerry’s observation.
@Adam – “It’s best not to just turn up at the front-page, click a couple of links and go “oh, what is the point?”. Be mature. Put some thought into it. Make an effort. Find out the names of some good people on there and join in. Ask questions. Find answers.” you sir, have clearly missed the point. did you actually *READ* the article, or just look at the pretty pictures? I know I used some big words, but please go give it another shot. now back to my lava lamp.
I tried Twitter to see if there was anything to it. I like to give any technology the benefit of the doubt.
The first thing I noticed is that not a single twitter user I talked to could give me a decent reason why they used Twitter. One person even told me that Twitter lets them know when their favorite bloggers have posted new entries (which any good RSS reader would already do). There seems to be a lot of hype around Twitter, but no substance. Some people I greatly respect use Twitter, but following them hasn’t given me anything that I don’t already get from their blogs. After using Twitter for several months I haven’t found any use that isn’t better served by other technologies. The only use so far is to post when I’m taking my daughter to the movies so that my friends know why I’m not answering my phone and to post when I’m running late for a meeting. Again, a function better served by publishing my calendar or IM’ing the people in my meeting.
Note that learning twitter-speak really isn’t that hard. If you IM or have used any IRC it isn’t that difficult to learn. Its only when people start abreviating names they used in earlier tweets that it becomes difficult to follow. This is actually a sign of just how ineffective this form of communication is.
From what I’ve seen there are far more people that do not get Twitter than do. I have noticed that some people are actually required to make a certain number of Twitter posts just as they are required to publish blog entries by their jobs. I’m not sure these people “get it” either. From what I can tell, the other people that “get it” are those same people that got pet rocks. People that use Twitter will defend it to the death because they would never want to admit that they fell subject to a fad that has no real substance and is basically a waste of time.
I’d love to hear from anyone that has found anything useful in Twitter that they wouldn’t have found anyway through another resource. Finding a link to a blog entry isn’t really useful since you would get it anyway if you follow the blog.
I will continue to use Twitter on a trial basis for probably another six months. The biggest issue is that I shouldn’t have to go out of my way to find a use for it. I don’t go out of my way to find a use for instant messenger, email or blogs, their usefullness is obvious. If you have to use it for a year just to find a use for it, is it worth the bother?
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Wow, well done. It’s always fun to talk about the selling points of Twitter with my friends and then you turn to the actual site and wonder – “now why can’t they highlight those same points I just made?” It’s like they’re assuming the community is doing it for them. Which, in some cases, they are. But it gives those listening the feeling that there’s an “A” / “B” conversation going on and if they don’t get it they can “C” their way out of it. Sorry for the dorky joke but in the end, most of us on Twitter are dorks in real life. And don’t try to hide it. You know who you are.
A spot-on article, and none of the comments has illuminated any clear benefit from Twitter, only self-justification that hasn’t cut any ice here. I’m a software developer, reasonably literate and reasonably “normal” and a keen user of new technologies that deliver benefits, but Twitter just seems a self-serving closed shop, busy tweeting to each other to justify its existence. From outside, it certainly looks to be a case of Kings New Clothes.
@Jeremy, replying to Adam – but surely that *is* the point of this article; I too have been there, looked, and found nothing to provide any hint of why I should spend the effort. I’ve got useful things I could be doing, not wasting the time. How is that not mature? “Ask questions” – well, the biggest one is “why are you using this?” and no one seems to have a real answer.
I know three people who Tweet, and have not the slightest compulsion to read their random comments. If I want to have a sensible exchange, I’ll mail or call or IM. Or meet!
@Jane Smith (quoted by Kate) – I can search perfectly well from Bing or Google and get links to the information I’m looking for – what benefit is there to using Twitter search, given the limit to content length?
The idea that a journalist seriously believes that “the news I want now comes to me directly” suggests a very narrow or closed perspective, like saying you could get it all from an RSS feed; my apologies if that can be demonstrated otherwise, but I can’t see how that could work. It’s a big old world outside Twitter and a lot happens in it.
The most sensible comments (aside from most of Jeremy’s replies) were those from Eric and Gerry.
@Teresa Bird – I also look for technology and elearning information on Twitter, but have not found anything that wasn’t better served by blogs or forums.
Example, you follow Online Education (OnlineEd4U) which lists articles about education. But the article source also has a RSS feed that will provide you this information. As another example, you also follow HigherEdJobs. This basically consists of job postings, but their site higheredjobs.com offers many more jobs than they post on Twitter and you would be much better served by subscribing to a detailed search on their web site.
I’m not sure about Kelly Mitchel or Sandra Hopkins or the other individuals you follow. If they are not social contacts I am not sure why you follow them.
I do PR with the Canadian travel industry. Even though I have been in this business for years what Twitter has given me is an even wider network of industry and travel,lifestyle,and outdoor media contacts. But I agree with you, Jeremy. If I was a newbie to Twitter and I was to open Twitter today and see the trending topics, I would be hard pressed to want to get involved. But really, the topics are part of a bigger beef of mine- this whole celebrity fascination. Don’t get it. Never have. Overrated, old, in my opinion, it’s a complete bore.
re:
“I’d love to hear from anyone that has found anything useful in Twitter that they wouldn’t have found anyway through another resource.”
This is an irrelevant standard.
We could just as easily ask “what do you find on ‘another’ resource that you couldn’t find on Twitter”?
Its simply a matter of how + where one choses to invest online time.
Im 57 years old.
I follow no celebrities, no reality tv, etc.
Much of the useful data I get from Twitter are real-time news/entertainment + cultural updates + logistic reminders.
A few examples:
artinstitutechi
ctatweet
philamuseum
nytimes
Barbicancentre
roundhouseLDN
northstarbar
(Im sure sports fans use multiple scoreboard tweets.)
These personal Twitter “follows” eliminate the need to intake anything else (blogs, etc)
I just quick-scan twitter input and move to what interests me.
Its mobile + a great way to shorten a commuter train ride.
Professionally, I have 10K+ “followers” across six commercial Twitter accounts.
We use these accounts primarily to advocate our industry niche and secondarily as a branding tool.
These commercial connections also share up-to-the-minute business insider info + LIMIT aimless surfing and dreaded in-the-bag trade magazines.
So we’ve summized that it’s useful for;
1.) Extroverted social-elitists.
2.) Niche businesses advertising to niche clients about niche information.
Does that sound about right? 🙂
@Abbey St Martin – Its not an irrelevant standard, and quite frankly you should be asking yourself what do you find on another resource that you cannot find on Twitter. You can find tons of information on other sources that you cannot find on Twitter including full articles rather than just the link, abstracts that you can browse to see whether something is worth looking into or not and sports scores and information tailored to the teams you follow. None of this is available on Twitter.
I follow the musuems in my area by subscribing to their rss feeds and blogs. I don’t read every blog entry, I scan the abstracts to determine what is useful. I know what events are opening in my area through the same medium and forums. I try to stick to moderated forums that filter out all the crap.
In my area there are few cultural spots that publish their data on Twitter.
I do follow my sports scores, they are both emailed and IM’d to me and there a few sports blogs that I find interesting enough to follow (although I check the abstract to see if an article is useful enough to spend time on). I used to follow NFL scores on Twitter until I realized that my IM message was always received several minutes before the equivalent tweet. When you see a link on Twitter there isn’t room to describe it adequately so you end up having to check it if you want to benefit from the content. How is that not aimless surfing?
As an example, below is the latest from artinstitutechi
explorechicago: RT @artinstitutechi: Find a cube? Make your own? Submit your creations to 500-ways.com by 1/31 & check out 546 examples http://tr.im/H3lp
about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
ReplyRetweet artinstitutechi: RT @poetryfound: “But laugh laugh at me / Men everywhere especially people from here” Thurs Feb 4 @6pm @artinstitutechi http://bit.ly/9ZAgBM
about 2 hours ago from web
ReplyRetweet poetryfound: “But laugh laugh at me / Men everywhere especially people from here” Thurs Feb 4 @6pm @artinstitutechi http://bit.ly/9ZAgBM
about 2 hours ago from web
ReplyRetweet artinstitutechi: Find a cube? Make your own? Submit your creations to 500-ways.com by 1/31 & check out 546 examples of what ppl are up to http://tr.im/H3lp
about 2 hours ago from web
ReplyRetweet artinstitutechi: @OttMomGo & @shadow8pro Appreciate your feedback!
about 2 hours ago from web
ReplyRetweet artinstitutechi: @WestSubLiving @nmac77 @LauraFantini @XimenaTalks @apxtangen @ORPrep Thanks for feedback, am now following you!
about 3 hours ago from web
ReplyRetweet mypopquizkid: Contemplating road tripping to Chicago on Friday for After Dark at @artinstitutechi. Looks like far too much fun for me to miss.
about 4 hours ago from web
How exactly is any of that useful. If you actually subscribe to the newsletter (at http://www.artic.edu/aic/) you can at least pull out the section on upcoming attractions without having to sort though the dribble.
What business insider info have you ever found on Twitter? You’re the first person I’ve ever heard make that claim and I do find that intriguing. I would also love to see how you use Twitter as a branding tool (especially considering that your web site makes no references to Twitter). I was going to check what types of tweets you post, but could not find you on Twitter.
You should always ask yourself whether the medium you are using is the best medium available so that you can optimize your time spent on the internet. With all the garbage out there, its more important than ever that you use the tools available to you to effectively separate the garbage from the useful. Lets face it, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that Twitter is painfully full of garbage.
If you find Twitter entertaining, and it is fulfilling your needs for internet content adequately, then I would classify you as a successful Twitter user. From the only 17% of Twitter users actually using it (which is actually inflated since there are a number of users like yourself that publish to multiple Twitter accounts), you are the exception rather than the rule.
Twitter seems to be just a jumble of silly statements. Half of which are not very “bright”, and generally abusive.
I believe its the low end of the scale for any respectable enterprise to use. Having their own forum, website etc is FAR more appealing than som cryptic TWIT (I’m talking about the users and the message!) .
NO information or statement on TWITTER could be taken seriously as it simply appears to be a global TRASH can where any garbage can be posted about anything or anyone!
Im not going to spend much more time on this.
But I must mention if you use just the standard Twitter dashboard the experience is less satisfying.
The interface we use is called Hootsuite.
You can see an average Twitter day for one of our beer labels here:
http://twitter.com/abbeystmartin (just scroll down)
We average in the low tens of thousands of daily views of this material.
NOTE: I receive all my RSS feeds on Twitter as well. I also intake a few key-word streams as well.
Plus, the Twitter people I follow serve as my personalized (human) version of DIGG, providing diverse personal content recommendations.
(Its “social” media after all.)
and to Parker:
niche eh?
https://twitter.com/Target
https://twitter.com/macTweeter
https://twitter.com/WWE
https://twitter.com/NFLONFOX
https://twitter.com/springsteen
https://twitter.com/Mortons
https://twitter.com/blockbuster
https://twitter.com/nikebasketball
btw: If you don’t get it, why waste your time talking about it?
Just had pancakes for breakfast, lolz Pls RT
Interesting article. There is certainly a steep learning curve in deciding what Twitter can do for you and how. I will look forward to changes and enhancements that will increase the utility and ease of use.
@JohnBailey — I follow on Twitter many individuals who do not write blogs or disseminate their info via websites, thus Twitter is the way. I find it really convenient for that. I suppose I’m one of those in your defined minority of successful Twitter users:-)
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Twitter is pointless. Each time I log on, once every few months or so, it’s just a person called “chrisgreen” who was the person who gave me the account, and I don’t even know who he is. All you see is one half of a conversation that doesn’t make sense at all. He’s obviously not talking to me, because it’s full of responses to nothing I’ve ever said. Anything I’ve ever said has gone nowhere. It’s pointless.
Ok, I’m no fan of twitter, but let me get this straight here.
You log into twitter, using an account that was “given” to you, by a “chrisgreen”, that you don’t even know, and then wonder why YOU don’t understand the messages in HIS account? Have you tried making a new account? Not that I suggest it.. It’s a worthless thing anyway.
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This is an outstanding post, and rightly explains why Twitter is the most popular massively flawed technology ever. The big problem is the onboarding process (or lack thereof). Nothing could be less welcoming (or instructive) for new users. I wrote about this (a bit of a rant) in a post “Why Twitter Needs Its Bottom Spanked” http://www.convinceandconvert.com/usability-and-ease-of-use/why-twitter-needs-its-bottom-spanked/
I was shocked a few days ago that I actually found Twitter useful. I was attending a live webcast and there were a number of issues with the webcast. The instructions for the event had instructed people to use a particular tag when tweeting about the webcast. By following the tags I was able to basically chat with the other attendees and resolve my issues.
Of course, this was basically using Twitter in place of an IRC chatroom. A chatroom would actually have been a much better solution as I would have been able to see the other attendees there, had better response time, been able to ignore those who were obnoxious, and wouldn’t have to keep remembering to put the tag at the end of everything. Unfortunately, Twitter was used instead. In Twitter’s defense, users can be blocked but they are blocked everywhere and not just in a particular thread.
Yet another example of a use for Twitter that would be better served by other mediums. Unfortunately its also a sign that even technically proficient users are choosing Twitter instead of better mediums.