

Ten Things Twitter is Not - seldo
http://seldo.com/weblog/2009/05/05/ten_things_twitter_is_not

======
TomOfTTB
Good Article. I'm not Twitter's biggest fan but if I'm honest with myself I
have to admit a lot of what I don't like about the service isn't from the
service itself but from the crazy hype that surrounds it.

In the end Twitter is a nice little service that provides a function that a
lot of people enjoy. When seeing it that way it's hard to have something
against it. It's only when people start claiming it will replace e-mail or be
the news service of the next century that I get annoyed.

~~~
netsp
Twitter's naming is very clever. I was talking to my girlfriend about birds
the other day in the park. "I wonder what they're saying? 'I'm here.' 'I'm
here?' 'Hungry' 'Scared' 'Happy?'" We decided they're just saying 'tweet
tweet.'

A lot of the time that's what we do too. We communicate just for the sake of
it. People talk to their babies. It's important to talk to your baby. It
doesn't really matter what you say specifically, but you should say nice
comforting things. Same with other people. "Hi, Howya goin." "nottaa-bother'
'tweet tweet.'

It still carries information.

------
riffic
Twitter is not a public utility. People should really be looking into
OpenMicroBlogging, and decentralization/federation with systems you set up and
control, such as Laconica. This allows you to control the namespace, and
downtime becomes your own problem.

~~~
sharkbrainguy

       ... and downtime becomes your own problem.
    

I think I can see what you're getting at here, but this sure doesn't sound
like something most people want to get into

~~~
riffic
well, not for individuals. But as far as organizations/agencies, relying on
twitter as a utility is ludicrous.

~~~
lacker
It's not ludicrous. The twitter competitors like laconica aren't really an
alternative, because the users you are trying to reach are all using twitter.

------
irrelative
I'm a little disappointed that Twitter has become the next big thing. Does it
seem to everyone else that the next big thing has gotten easier and easier for
the average programmer to make?

Google made sense as king of the hill, since it solved a relatively hard
problem incredibly well. Then came Facebook, which solved a fairly easy
problem, but scaled really well. Now Twitter has come along and solved a
relatively simple problem, and they probably have the scaling issue figured
out finally. Maybe I've just become jaded, but I thought we expected more from
_the next big thing_ both in terms of execution and difficulty.

~~~
froo
_I'm a little disappointed that Twitter has become the next big thing. Does it
seem to everyone else that the next big thing has gotten easier and easier for
the average programmer to make?_

It's not disappointing at all, just because something is easy to code, doesn't
necessarily mean it's any less of a valid problem nor does this constitute a
worthless business.

Look at say amazon.com - Not entirely difficult to code, in fact, many point-
and-click webstore solutions already exist. The fact is, they were in the
right place, the right time, the right scale and worked harder than anyone
else.

I think you're underestimating the value of working hard - irrespective of
problem difficulty. Twitter might have stumbled early due to some bad early
choices, but that's business. Even the much hallowed Google makes errors and
bad judgement calls.

 _but I thought we expected more from the next big thing both in terms of
execution and difficulty._

You don't think the huge media blitz that Twitter is getting at the moment
hasn't been seeded by Twitter themselves? It was a very clever marketing ploy
that has been executed well.

------
tlrobinson
11\. An RSS replacement <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595186>

12\. A potential Apple acquisition
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594847>

~~~
seldo
Re: #11, yeah, totally. The solution to information overload is to overload
yourself on Twitter instead?

I do believe that the "unread posts" model for RSS readers is counter-
productive, and is taking RSS as a consumer technology with it, but it's not
dead yet.

~~~
lucumo
_> I do believe that the "unread posts" model for RSS readers is counter-
productive, and is taking RSS as a consumer technology with it_

Can you elaborate on why you think that?

------
axod
>> "celebrities started turning up on Twitter once they heard it was getting
popular. They didn't make it popular in the first place. It got popular
because it was useful."

I don't know, myself, and I'm sure several others, only bothered with it to
see @stephenfry tweets. And I'm pretty sure he's been on it for a _long_ time
now.

~~~
doug_m
I agree - in the UK Twitter seemed to stay under the radar for a long time
compared to the US then one week the BBC seemed to brief staff on it and the
large scale public adoption was overnight and very much celebrity or central-
media driven.

------
brc
11\. Immune to spammers

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Immune? Who do you think half of their users are?

~~~
thwarted
Exactly. The 11th thing twitter is not is immune to spammers.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I understood what he meant...I was saying that not only are they not immune,
it's basically a symbiotic relationship.

------
knightrider

        Daniel Schorr two recent examples of breaking the study's implication of breaking and sometimes debunked stories that played members ironically highlighting and the need to the The original study by Antonio Damasio and college guest on the The Daily Show and instream media reports of you. A large number of mainstream media coverage of the service saying "there's no surprise young people by middle aged people by middle aged people by middle aged people by middle aged people love it - accounts of events lacked rigorous fact-checking and other than pay attention to "constant social networking to recent exaggerated the Daily Show, the strip characters ironically highlighting the triviality of "twitter" and that Twitter format is not good (no pun intended).

------
stevedekorte
0\. Profitable (yet)

~~~
rmc00
Most definitely yet. Twitter search has some real potential. It's growing
rapidly as a place that people can search for quick reviews of restaurants,
movies, etc.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
This makes no sense. Why would I use twitter to look for reviews on
restaurants instead of Yelp? Why would I use Twitter for movie reviews over
metacritic or rotten tomatoes? Hell, if I'm going to use search to look for
reviews on something, why wouldn't I just use Google?

~~~
thwarted
And one thing that is interesting about this is that Google is a superset of
twitter, and twitter could never be a superset of Google. Google can more
easily index twitter's content than twitter could index the rest of the
internet.

------
kaiuhl
This article reads as wishful thinking of what Twitter is and will become from
the viewpoint of the San Francisco startup scene who have using Twitter now
for a few years and have watched it morph.

Twitter could be, especially in the future, many of those numbered items; it
is only wishful thinking that people not use it for vanity or to actually
answer the question, "what are you doing?" or as a replacement for quick
emails or use it as a blog. One needs only look toward Birdhouse to see how
serious publishing on Twitter can be taken.

Something Twitter is not: definable during its rapid growth.

