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Twitter just died a little

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Twitter is very close to be no fun at all anymore. Why? Because Twitter is going to be mainstream, because everybody joins Twitter and because Twitter is now something you can talk about with people at a bus stop and they know what you are talking about. It is becoming mass media and a marketers playground. Is it a bad thing? Yes, a little bit of Twitter died because of the mainstream adoption, it made it a little bit less exclusive and created two new problems:

Not only did a bit of Twitter die due to mainstream adoption, its platform is having a hard time too. Twitter was not build in mind with the immense follower numbers of Britney, Stephen Fry, Ellen DeGeneres and many other celebrities. I am not claiming they are the issue for outages and other issues, however scaling a growing platform to these kind of numbers is a lot different than scaling a platform for something that is 10 times smaller and the number of issues increased the last few weeks according to the status blog of Twitter.

The existing social graph has changed completely in Twitter, perhaps it is even destroyed by the celebrities and the people on the suggested people page of Twitter (the suggested people are total random and are not linked to your interest, profile or tweets in anyway). There are now people that follow 19 others and have 200k followers. What kind of value will add that to the social graph, will it add any at all (and how much of an issue is it)?

Is Twitter dying bit a bit? Or is it just a maturing platform with some growing pains.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

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Michael:
Reading many articles about Twitter, I notice some similarity with topics "from the past". It strikes me similar comments (The fun is gone now that everyone has it) sort of remind me of the general discussions about IRC (anyone remembers that one?), browsing (in the days of Mosaïc), email (Lotus cc:Mail), BLOGS and basically, Internet itself. What's the use, what's the fun, what's the need etc. IMHO it's part of the growing pains and we will see this discussion about any new topic, yet to come. Puberty hurts, sometimes ;-)
Giovani Spagnolo:
Well... I don't think this is an issue. I mean, it could be an issue for twitter business if their social graph does not reflect the collection of their users' interests.
But, on a user point of view, I agree with Scoble (see <a href="http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/22/scoble-responsible-for-destroying-the-utility-of-the-social-graph/)." rel="nofollow">http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/22/scoble-responsible-for-destroying-the-utility-of-the-social-graph/).</a>
People really don't care if twitter or facebook want them to connect with "real" friends or "alike minds" because this is good for their business. People should always be free to follow (and unfollow) anyone and while friends networks keep being mapped by one single social graph, it would be hard for them to monetize well.
rimans:
rimans's picture
Totally agree Michael, puberty hurts, sometimes. I still remember IRC (use it infrequently the few months) and you are right, it is the same topic that pops up every now and than around new services.
rimans:
rimans's picture
Giovani I read the article Scoble wrote and I tend to agree with hum on some points. However on the other what you are saying, I do think people care to who they are connected / recommended on Twitter or FB. People want to interact with others (like you said: people they choose to follow or unfollow) and belong to groups they can relate to.
Completely irrelevant people (like the suggested people in Twitter) do not add value and makes things confusing. Perhaps it will even reduce the fun for newcomers more, since people cannot relate to the suggested people they are following.
Having multiple social graphs could indeed help to solve these kind of issues.
Giovani Spagnolo:
&gt; I do think people care to who they are connected / recommended on Twitter or FB
Sure! I didn't meant to say the contrary. I meant people do not care about FB or Twitter businesses when connecting. And this leads to the issue you raised:
&gt;Completely irrelevant people (like the suggested people in Twitter) do not add value and makes things confusing.
It is true these people really disrupt FB/Twitter social graphs, but they can't be ignored.
At the end we all agree: we need multiple social graphs :-)
Omyword!:
I see blogging, blogging communities (like BlogCatalog), Facebook, Twitter - all as digital social experiments. I join them all, and sit back and see what happens. I had a Twitter account for a year, I think, before I "got it." And, of course, I'm not sure I quite get any of it...yet. They are all evolving. Some, like MySpace, I've left by the wayside.
My big Aha! moment about Twitter was during the Mumbai terrorism incident. I had a dynamically updating page up for a few days, watching every #Mumbai tweet as it rolled in. Then I watched Twitter being used effectively in American politics, by the No on Prop 8 crowd. Each time somebody saw a Yes on Prop 8 protest, they Twittered the location and an army of No on Prop 8 protesters arrived on the scene. Fascinating.
I'm old enough to have used IRC in an online game development environment (1994-ish), and remember the comic intervals in between the serious work chat. I also understand the problems of platforms that outgrow the traffic, and spent many a night sleeping on the server room floor as we tried to beef up our hardware to handle 3 million gamers versus the 50K we assumed would play. :-)
So, Twitter may live or die for many reasons - an inability to handle the fame/overload, underfunding or even internal management disputes. You never know. But the social experiment is here to stay.
rimans:
rimans's picture
Really like your point of view Omyword! on those networks as digital social experiments. Never looked at it that way.

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