
Why Twitter Will Endure - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/weekinreview/03carr.html?ref=weekinreview
======
vaksel
Twitter won't endure, it's a land of marketers and bloggers and personalities
pushing their own stuff. It's too complicated for real people, and unlike the
bloggers they don't have an incentive to figure it out.

I'm a perfect example, I tried twitter like 6 months ago, tried it for a
month, than gave up because there was just too much noise. I'm now back, but
only because I use twitter to promote my own site. And since I now had an
incentive to figure things out, I found things like tweet deck and lists that
make things a lot easier.

~~~
trevorturk
I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a
communication tool. It's valuable if/when there are useful things being
communicated with it.

To say that Twitter is a "land of marketers and bloggers and personalities
pushing their own stuff" is like saying that telephones are only useful for
telemarketers.

To say that Twitter is too noisy is like saying that there's nothing good on
TV. If you don't like what's on _your_ TV you're free to put on whatever you
like.

~~~
elblanco
> I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a
> communication tool.

This isn't the problem with Twitter. I think everybody _gets_ that it's a
communication tool. It's just that it's an awful tool for communication. It's
designed with a number of ridiculous and artificial constraints to conform to
an aging and rapidly dying technology (phone texting).

Almost the entire ecosystem of communication you see on Twitter is designed to
overcome the limitations of the medium, from Twitter specific acronyms (RT,
OH, b/c, etc.) to url shorteners (<http://bit.ly/>, <http://tinyurl.com/>,
etc.) to multiple tweets to cover a single topic, and on and on and on. Most
of the time, things like urls are simply designed to be pointers to actual
content anyways, because you can't fit the content into a Tweet. In effect
Twitter becomes an RSS/link aggregator.

Sure it's _different_ than other communication mediums, but it's not really
solving a problem that anybody in particular had, and ends up creating a whole
new slew of problems because of the poor decision to tie the entire
architecture essentially artificial limitations.

------
djm
No matter how much I have tried to understand twitter, I have never really
_gotten_ it. I can only see it as being a fad.

The character constraint forces people to say whatever they want to say
concisely which I can see as being valuable - it's all too easy to otherwise
get lost in the sea of data that is the internet. But that's about it.

How do people use it? Are most people using twitter from their laptop/PC or
from cell phones? I can understand the need to keep messages small if you are
using a hardware interface that provides a constraint on what you can
practically write. But those limitations will go away in time.

I would guess that people will want increasingly higher bandwidth
communication, not less. I can see people putting up with SMS type messaging
for now, but I'd bet they'll ditch it when they can buy a working star trek
communicator.

Seriously, if anyone can provide me with the true enlightenment on this please
do so. It sometimes seems as though I'm the only person alive who just doesn't
get it.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_I would guess that people will want increasingly higher bandwidth
communication, not less._

I was going to call this a misconception. But, in fact, the answer is that
Twitter _is_ a high-bandwidth medium. For readers.

(It's more effort for writers, but who cares about us? There are orders of
magnitude more readers than writers.)

It's true that I could dump a lot more raw information on you with a ten-
second video Tweet than a 140-character text Tweet. But most of that
information would not only be _useless_ (you probably don't care to know the
exact quality of the light falling on the bookshelf behind me, or how well I
shaved this morning) but positively _negative_ (because it will distract you,
detract from my point, and tend to engage and distract many more levels of
your brain, thus contributing to the mental cost of context-switching that is
the bane of modern existence).

What I crave as a reader, among other things [1], is a source of plain-text
links and messages (which can be followed up if desired) that are drawn from a
body of people I vaguely trust, or their immediate circle of friends; that
have been wordsmithed, at great effort, to pack the maximum content in the
minimum space; and that have been arranged on a single screen that can be
browsed without fuss or effort and that doesn't contain big blinky ads that
have been engineered to be among the most distracting things ever made. And,
what do you know, Twitter is a pretty good approximation of that, especially
for events that are evolving in real time.

\---

[1] This is kind of an important point. Twitter is one tool, for one kind of
reading. I wouldn't entirely give up blogs, or YouTube, or HN for Twitter,
just as I wouldn't give up all books for Wikipedia.

~~~
elblanco
Now say all that in a single tweet.

~~~
catfish
Put the comments in a blog. Tweet the link.

~~~
iron_ball
Then Twitter is essentially an RSS front-end.

~~~
catfish
Maybe, but its a tech that is more understandable to the masses, than "RSS
feed". You have to think like a typical client with a new phone. How many
phones have a twitter client? RSS?

~~~
elblanco
I can guarantee that if a smart phone has a twitter client, it most certainly
has an RSS reader. Furthermore, I can guarantee that many smartphones that do
not have a twitter client have an RSS reader.

m.google.com/reader

~~~
catfish
I can guarantee you that if I ask 100 average non"hacker news" people what RSS
stands for I will get a blank stare, but if I ask them about twitter.....

------
timr
_"I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless
connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the
leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward
approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat
in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story
involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer.
@VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward
saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy
and comforting all at once.)"_

For me, the one enduring lesson of Twitter is that if you build something that
makes journalists and "public-relations professionals" feel important, you
will get lots of free press.

