posted by swatkin6. comments: 0
After the last post I wrote here about Twitter, I drastically changed my usage of the now ubiquitous microblogging service that has somehow managed to integrate the online activities of both Iranian protesters and Ashton Kutcher. And by “drastically changed” I mean specifically that I have started using Twitter less in general, and for more specific purposes.
I would not consider myself to have been a heavy Twitter user to begin with, but lately I have I pruned the list of people I “follow” on Twitter down to mostly people that I actually know or have met or have some actual connection to, and I removed most of the celebrities and companies from my follow list. I think maybe Wil Wheaton is the lone remaining exception, but I’d have to double check to be sure. In recent months Twitter has become in many ways just another means for advertising/promotion/publicity and in so, has become (to me) much more noise than signal.
The difference, of course, between Twitter “advertising” and other forms is that I have control over exactly who I let through to communicate with me through this channel. On TV, for example, I don’t have a way to “unfollow” that company who makes the talking baby commercials, which are way creepy. But Twitter lets users opt-in, which puts more power in the users’ hands rather than the advertisers, which I am generally in favor of.
I recently read a blog post by Cody Brown that makes some good points about how people use Twitter, and that aligns with my own experience. Brown discusses Twitter’s current popularity, and where it might be heading in the future. He compares Twitter to MySpace in its heyday. Back in 2005-06, MySpace had a slew of users, but according to Brown, the MySpace people didn’t really understand their users’ reasons for using the site. Brown notes:
When a new cultural practice, like ’social networking’, is in the grass roots stages of development you can’t assume that people are going to your site because they like it. Your competition doesn’t really exist yet. What they might like are certain aspects of your product or they might be using parts of it in ways you never designed. (emphasis in original)
Brown’s post describes how MySpace users proved to be wedded not to the site itself, but to particular functions of the site (music, entertainment, and social networking) and when other sites began to provide those functions in more effective ways, users migrated away to other sites (such as Facebook for social networking, and Last.fm for music), leaving MySpace in 2009 to be what Brown calls a “cyber ghetto.”
What we’re seeing at Twitter today is similar to MySpace a few years ago. An enormous number of people are using Twitter, but the site’s position in the still-undefined space of “social media” allows it to be used in different ways by different people: for some users Twitter is simply a means of social networking, but for others the primary function of Twitter is advertising, or real time journalism, or customer service, and so on. In general, it’s a channel for one-to-many communication, but there are many different reasons to engage in such communication and Twitter currently doesn’t really seem to care about those differences.
Users aren’t wedded to the site or service itself, they’re attracted to things that help them do the things they want to do, and when other services provide a better alternative (for real time journalism, networking, etc.), we’ll see a migration away from Twitter to other sites.
Twitter is definitely enjoying popularity right now, but it will be interesting to see if they figure out a way to maintain their user base when those users are pulling Twitter in many directions at once.
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