Not that long ago I was writing about how much I liked twitter. It seems that as a fairly late adopter, I missed most of the glory days and it is now on the typical community life cycle:
- New and edgy.
- Still edgy but popular enough to be useful.
- Getting popular but still largely a cool community.
- Starting to get a lot of “buzz” as the “next big thing.”
- Being overused and abused.
- Becoming utterly lame.
- Bought by a major company.
Given that Twitter doesn’t have a revenue model, they may want to hurry up and accept that $230 million dollar price tag that’s being thrown around. To me the biggest sign that it’s over the hill is the mad “popularity contest” component of it. Your goal in Twitter now is apparently to be followed by as many people as possible, regardless of who they are. There are techniques for finding more people who will “auto follow” you. This leaves me with one big question:
Why Do I Want Someone Who Has No Interest In Me To Follow Me?
If that person isn’t ever going to be interested in, and probably won’t even read, my tweets, then why am I happy they’re following me? At this point I feel somewhat silly that I persued a “quality over quantity” approach to my Twitter friends. What the popularity contest tells me however, is that most people are not really reading anything that’s being Tweeted. As people read less and less, the service becomes less valuable.
Soon enough, someone else will come up with some other new cool community and the early adopters will go have some fun there until it gets lame and they have to move on again. Hopefully, next time I can be at the front end, instead of the back. Anyone know what that next thing will be?
1 response so far ↓
I think it has value still in the same way you are gravitating to smaller social sites instead of digg. Because you can still be followed by people in your niche. I still follow tweets for a select few tweeters in niche’s that interest me, and I read those tweets, and get value from them.
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