

Is Twitter Dead? Yes and No - Anon84
http://www.enewslatest.com/2009/06/11/who-killed-twitter/?dzref=192982

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antirez
Twitter will never be the new facebook for a very simple reason: Facebook is
conceived so that people that have nothing of interesting to say (a huge
percentage, sadly) can still tell a lot of useless things, post photos, take a
quiz, comment some stupid thing about the status of somebody else.

Twitter instead is designed for people that have something to say (otherwise
no-one will follow you given that there is no the reciprocal bit) and are even
able to say it in 140 chars.

As a twitter user I'm very glad of this, since I hope that staying an elite
thing twitter will continue to be interesting and worth to use. My claim is
that also twitter owners should be happy about this. In the long run it can be
more interesting to have 1% of the users but with good content than 99% of
users that don't pay a dollar and produce things that are not of interest.

~~~
gaius
That is complete nonsense. People may have nothing interesting to say _to you_
but photos, events, statuses etc are interesting to _their friends_. And this
is easy to prove: Facebook is one of the stickiest websites around, people
keep coming back, whereas as the article points out, Twitter users rapidly
lose interest. And that's because Twitter is for people who don't have enough
to say to sustain an actual blog.

~~~
req2
They lose interest because Twitter is more of a tool than an activity, and
Facebook serves to fill all activity and tool roles it can fill.

~~~
GrandMasterBirt
A tool to do what? Get some hype from bored-at-work followers?

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ivankirigin
The sign up process they desibe is right on. You show up, don't see anything,
leave, and a while later (maybe months) you come back and it clicks.

Twitter is so vibrant I expect string growth next month, but the absurd speed
from the best media coverage possible was clearly unsustainable.

------
swombat
This is actually a pretty decent article, despite the exaggerated, link-bait
title. Worth a read, some interesting analysis.

------
Dilpil
Twitter will go the way of facebook, which of course will go the way of
myspace, which of course is about to go the way of friendster, which went the
way of pets.com, and so on and so forth all the way until we get back to
tulips.

------
Tichy
I think handholding for new users is a serious problem. It might have killed
Second Life - at least to me it simply was too complicated to get a decent
looking avatar and find interesting things to do. I had some fun experiences
in SL, but ultimately it was too difficult to get orientation.

Hope Twitter won't see the same fate - their "recommended users to follow"
thing is definitely not cutting it yet. Then again, for the mainstream users,
some starlets to follow might be just the thing.

~~~
tptacek
Second Life has no intrinsic value that I can see. Twitter does; it's
persistant, searchable, real-time communication.

~~~
Tichy
SL could be a pretty good playground. I would have liked to create games for
it. I guess stuff like the alife island (forgot the name) were pretty cool,
too. A lot of creativity took place.

A couple of days I logged into SL again, and the only places with people in
them seemed to be the escort services :-( (I looked at the map and just zoomed
into places with many people present, and they always were escort agencies, I
think).

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peripitea
I think an underrated problem is that new users are all greeted with these
directions: "... answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

I bet that fewer than 10% of the interesting tweets I've read involved what
the author was doing. But this quote leads to the mistaken public perception
that twitter is just a bunch of people talking about what they had for
breakfast. Many new users send out one or two boring tweets, assume everyone
else is doing the same, and give up on it -- much like how the author
described his original Twitter experience.

I'm not sure what a better prompt would be -- maybe "What are you thinking?",
or nothing at all. Regardless, I'm sure they could make a sizable impact on
public perception and newbie usage patterns by changing that quote.

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hellweaver666
Twitter died for me when the marketing people started trying to take advantage
of it. now all I get is constant follow requests from self proclaimed
'internet marketing experts', most of which have only signed up in the past
couple of weeks and clearly don't really have a clue about the true value of
Twitter since all they do is post links to the same get rich quick articles
over and over again.

------
mariana
“Los muertos que vos matasteis gozan de buena salud”. -- Don Juan Tenorio

------
joel_feather
Twitter is where all the IRC people now are.

~~~
vorador
I think that the twitter and irc people are two very different categories of
netizens that almost don't overlap.

~~~
rue
I can anecdotally disagree with that...in fact, the only reason I got a
Twitter thingy after resisting for about two years is because the crowd in my
IRC hangouts incessantly refer to "tweets."

Twitter is certainly not a replacement for IRC in these circles either,
though, merely an extra tool. It is not well-suited for it, not least because
support for anything like real-time conversations between _multiple_ people is
almost completely absent -- which I think the correct design decision.

Bizarrely, some of the non-IRC people are trying to sell Twitter as some kind
of a chatroom, see for example this recent TIME Magazine article:

[http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604,00....](http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604,00.html).

 _Edit: tautology._

