

Is Twitter overhyped? - technologizer
http://technologizer.com/2009/04/09/is-twitter-overhyped-a-debate-please-join-it/

======
wmf
Twitter is great when used for its intended purpose (bitching, ego inflation,
finding parties at SXSW). Many of the newer use cases - marketing over
Twitter, customer support over Twitter, payments over Twitter, technical
debate over Twitter, IP over Twitter, etc. - appear very cumbersome and
inefficient compared to the old ways.

We have been here before. I remember a company in 2001 that built some sort of
business app that routed all its traffic over the public Gnutella network -
just because. When I see people doing something over Twitter just because,
that's overhyped.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_very cumbersome and inefficient compared to the old ways_

Okay, I'll bite on some of this.

 _marketing over Twitter_

Compared to email marketing? For which I cannot enforce opt-in? Which deluges
me in content that I don't necessarily have time to read? Shall I even bother
comparing it to telemarketing -- is there any question what will win _that_
comparison? Advantage: Twitter.

 _customer support over Twitter_

I've never heard of one-to-one customer support over Twitter. Surely email is
better, except when the spam filters intervene. For FAQs there are wikis and
forums and good old web pages and new-fangled ticket tracking sites.

But what about generic, time-sensitive or high-priority hints, suitable for a
sizeable fraction of the userbase? "Sorry for the outage; we are working on
it." "Everyone should know that there's a security bug that has just been
fixed." "Today 50 people have asked about Feature X. It's right there in the
Bookmarks menu. Read the updated FAQ." These are the kinds of messages that
aren't a good fit for bulk email. There's never really been a good venue for
them before. [1] Twitter is going to spawn a lot more of them.

I'm not sure about payments over Twitter, but I know better than to laugh: I
remember when PayPal was hilariously funny.

\---

[1] Okay, RSS feeds. But Twitter is, among other things, an RSS feed that non-
technical humans can understand. And that is constrained to be blessedly
short. And there are other semantic and social differences.

~~~
wallflower
> I've never heard of one-to-one customer support over Twitter

Comcast <http://twitter.com/ComcastCares>

~~~
jemmons
You either have a tenuous grasp on the definition of "one-to-one" or _vastly_
overestimate Comcast.

------
ivankirigin
This came up in a poker game yesterday. I pointed out to someone who thought
Twitter peaked: \- They grew close to 100% last month \- I've gotten more
business contacts over twitter than LinkedIn & Facebook combined \- Twitter is
much more conversational than Facebook when between strangers. That makes the
business & celeb side of it stronger.

I expect Facebook to do more to let companies better engage with their users.
One problem is the privacy. Facebook conversations are largely hidden from the
public eye. How will my wall-to-wall comment about shitty Comcast service get
picked up by them?

I do think the celeb hype around twitter is just insane. Multiple talk show
hosts spend a lot of time begging people to sign up. You really can't pay for
that kind of PR.

~~~
rms
What has got me to (occasionally) use twitter is interacting with celebrities.
I had a small interaction with one of my favorite rappers which is neat. And
if you ever want a 140 character response from Craig Newmark, send him a
tweet, the man is a machine, he answers absolutely every single message. And
if you say "craigslist" without directing it to him he'll still probably say
something.

~~~
nir
It seems like one of the things that exist when a medium is young and there
aren't that many people using it. There were probably some celebs you could
email in 1990 (or IM in 1997) and have them reply. I doubt this will last if
Twitter grows much.

~~~
rms
I think it could last. I wouldn't expect celebs to answer every message, but
there's something inherently appealing to the 140 character limit that makes
it feel more manageable.

------
Zak
>I question what’s the point? It solves a question that nobody asked, and
_feeds the narcissism that pervades our culture_.

The question contains its own answer, partially. I can see wanting lighter
blogging tools, but what I don't quite get is why so many people want
something limited to such short messages. Does the majority of the population
want all conversation reduced to soundbite-sized posts? What am I missing
here?

~~~
robotrout
It's been said that the enforced brevity is somehow liberating. You can't be
eloquent in 140 characters, so you don't need to stress so much about trying
to be. Same can be said for texting.

------
roberto
Q: What's the difference between Twitter and setting your status on a XMPP
client? A: XMPP scales.

~~~
bradgessler
A: XMPP doesn't keep a public log of your status updates.

------
JereCoh
Yes.

~~~
gord
yes, and I was quite amazed at how well marketed it is.

The girl who is responsible for such viral ninjitsu memes as "I heard it on
twitter first that a plane landed in the hudson.. safely" makes Seth Godin
look like an agorophobic dislexik.

------
paul7986
Twitter's killer product is search..

Google you search websites. Twitter you search conversations.

More ppl have conversations then have a website! The hype is accurate as it
will prove very complimentary to Google or become a Google killer. The crowd
is rarely wrong; if it was Google wouldn't be what it is today!

------
ojbyrne
From the article -- "or accept a fair market valuation to be acquired and
become a part of something that’s more interesting." The problem is that as a
feature it's worthless. It can be recreated relatively simply. It has no value
beyond the network effect, and it's been demonstrated a bunch of times that
the network effect doesn't follow acquisitions (dodgeball anyone? jaiku ftw?).
That is the unsolved problem - not how to build a community, but how to
monetize one. I think that facebook (at least until they decided to ripoff
twitter) was the closest to solving that problem.

------
zmimon
There's no doubt it's overhyped, but there's also no doubt that, rightly or
not, it's making a huge impact. In fact, I think it's a fascinating case study
in how the most horribly implemented and feature deprived technologies are
sometimes the most successful.

IMHO, the one and only thing they did right, and which made all the
difference, was to implement SMS as a gateway. This made it possible for
everyone to use twitter before actual twitter clients existed. And ironically
this in turn forced them to make the service completely feature deprived -
bizarrely short length, no links, no images, no formatting in messages ...

If someone had proposed it to me I would have immediately said they needed a
richer client - how could they start so far behind what everyone already
expected from a simple IM client? Well, I think it was exactly that which
actually drove the success of the whole thing.

------
quizbiz
Twitter went a long while with the "web crowd" being bombarded with it but
there was no mainstream acceptance. Then within the last month or so,
somewhere around the senators using it during the State of the Union, light
night comedy, news networks, even the radio program I listen to in the
mornings can't stop talking about it.

Personally, I still don't see the point and I'm a little irritated at Facebook
for implementing a Twitter-like interface core.

------
rrival
When did Evan become 'Ev'?

~~~
jimfl
Since forever.

------
jemmons
No.

