All that Twitters is not told

Let us all praise Twitter...again. Now its Read/Write Web's turn to hurl Twitter up the Hype curve: They gush that....

Twitter is fast becoming a serious platform for discourse and discussion. More than a status app, it is being used as a first alert mechanism for the dissemination of news and for immediate discussion surrounding that news. It is the coverage of news events and the continued emergence of citizen journalism that will push Twitter toward the mainstream this year.

Except that, in the same article, it is noted that.....

Sure some heavily disputed numbers put Twitter into the mainstream with fairly deep penetration, but anecdotal evidence would suggest otherwise -- most of my non-tech friends haven't yet even heard of Twitter.

But chin up, because....

But 2008 could be the year all that changes. Twitter might be about to grow up.

And why may this change be about to happen? Let us count the ways we may praise Twitter as a purveyor of The Good News to the multitudes:

It's fast. Increasingly mainstream news reporters and bloggers are utilizing Twitter to put up news tid bits as they happen, and commentary as it pops into their heads.

It's open. By embracing an open API architecture from the start, Twitter has smartly nourished a large set of tools that help people use the service. This makes it easier for people to get content on Twitter in the manner most convenient and most comfortable to them, which in the long run should help drive adoption of the service.

It's two-way. Unlike TV or newspaper, Twitter allows for a conversation. Like its new media brethren, blogs, Twitter encourages discourse and feedback.

It fills a void. Twitter is built for the new news cycle. "Traditional news operated on a 24-hour cycle. Blogs shortened this to minutes and hours. Twitter shortens it further to seconds".

I'll buy being open - that has helped Twitter to do something that services up to now have not managed, which is to be a Unified Messaging service that is easily accessible via mobile and PC. As to the others, being 2-way and fast has been with us since the first hesitant steps of the AltNet and email. And as to filling a void with news and commentary that has just popped into somebody's head

But soft...despite the paeans of praise, all is not yet perfect in Twitterland:

Sometimes, it's too fast. Twitter happens in moments. If you think keeping up with the blogging cycle at big blogs like Engadget is tough, then keeping up with a thousand voices on Twitter is damn near impossible.....for the mainstream audience, Twitter might need better filtering tools before people can really wrap their heads around it.

It can be muddled. One of the strengths of Twitter is that it is a two-way street -- you an talk back to the people who are talking to you. But it's not threaded, so replies get shuffled around and often times, out of context, just become confusing

It's hard to navigate. There is a learning curve to Twitter. Finding people isn't as easy as it should be (certainly not as easy as on mainstream social networks like MySpace or Facebook, which people are used to).

Ah...so it can't do what we've taken for granted from email and chat software for 15 years then. And as to that filtering - I'm an early adopter and I want it ! What the article also does not mention at all is that Twitter is extremely unreliable - it goes down, typically at points of high usage. There were wails of woe when it went down a few weeks ago in the middle of the global Applegasm. And I don't buy that its faster - in recent weeks I have been watching to see where news came from first, and I see no discernable difference between Twitter and email - it all depends on what you are plugged into at the time.

Look, I use Twitter, it has its uses. But I use RSS aggregators, email, Skype, IM and Group / Forums too, and I'd put Twitter at the back the queue for "usefulness". This blog has been published on Twitter since June 2007, and I note an increasing number of news feeds, blogs etc are now being published on Twitter as it becomes better known (the BBC has been on for ages, Techdirt went on last night, I'm not sure if Read/Write Web is on). It has some benefits, but its functionality means that is fairly time consuming to use, so I tend to take these services over email.

Here's the deal stripped of the hype:

(i) Its basically Chatroom 2.0 - ie its chatroom functionality with the ability to see your friends' friends and their interactions, which is the unspoken voyeuristic pleasure that is the killer app of social media. And as it is a social network and "chatroom" system, it is a good way of making new friends among fellow geeky early adopters. It is very addictive at first - chatroom type systems always are - but is very weak in ability to follow conversations, so becomes frustrating, though it is better at turning off trolls than older systems.

(ii) It is well crafted for what it is - easy to get onto, intuitive to use, cutely whimsical when it doesn't work (which it needs to be!)

(iii) As the Read/Write article notes, it is slowly changing in usage style, the signal to noise ratio is improving - people are no longer just wittering on about their lunch, and are starting to talk about the sort of stuff we take for granted on email, forums etc. But the noise is still high, and I can see it potentially getting worse as all sorts of services use those open API's to broadcast even more frequently by automating people's output - imagine getting status updates from all your friends every 5 minutes..... For this service to work in any meaningful way there has to be much better filtering and threading.

(iv) It's the Hello! magazine for following Net Celebs. If you get vicarious pleasure in the day to day minutiae of your favourite Geek celebrity, Twitter is the place for you - they are all hanging out there.

(v) It is, as others have noted, licenced datamining - over time you are putting a huge amount of data about yourself out there, and there are people scraping it, and this will increase. If it doesn't worry you, fine - but it should.

(vi) It is not yet five-nines reliable, (not even three-nines reliable I should think) so its is not a service you would use for any critical comms needs, and it really is 15 years behind email in persistent message handling, so don't use it as a back-catalogue. (Update - its down as I write, apparently the Presidential pundits killed it this time)

(vii) It is the preferred means of communication - at the moment anyway - for a subset of my social network, so thats where I have to go to talk to them.

(viii) I have noticed a huge increase in people coming onto Twitter in the past few months, many of these are coming off Facebook, and they all remark that it is more "social" than a static Social Network, so clearly near-synchronous comms is the more powerful model for social networking. (No doubt Facebook will implement a Twitter-like service soon)

But its real killer application is as a Unified Messaging service, and that's the reason I think these sort of services will take off. Whether it will be Twitter, or Jaiku, or some new one, or even an upgunned IM system, remains to be seen. I noted earlier this week that people were using it to talk about a TV program while they were watching it, which was interesting as much of the current SocNet babble is about having to have "Social Objects" intrinsic to the social network, whereas in this case the network was used to communicate about an extrinsic object. And that I think is a tipping point - it allows people to talk seamlessly about what they want to talk about, when they want..