To clarify, my journey here isn’t to explore Twitter itself (though it’s inevitably part of it) but to find out what makes the underground blogging community tick. Why is everyone itching to write off Twitter and move on to new things? What will happen to Twitter if the early adopters/bloggers that made it great abandon ship — but leave its strong community of mainstream dedicated users? And what does it say about this trend in web 2.0 overall?
I’ve set up my Google alerts to send me new stories on “end of twitter” and “twitter” and while most of them re-hash the same things, some bring up new points.
I think the big issue here is who is using Twitter and who is writing about it. When Twitter started, it was used by early adopters and bloggers; it was almost cliquey in nature as more and more blogs joined the club and a few others used it to update friends but abandoned it after they found not many of their friends used the service. But over the past year or two, it’s become much more mainstream and a staple for businesses, bloggers, general users, celebrities, and news outlets as an up-to-the-second way of keeping updated.
So who is writing about it? A quick search for “Twitter” brings a ton of of posts from bloggers who are working on convincing the rest of the world that it rocks (i.e. “Top Ten Ways to Use Twitter to….”), a few talking about the new Tweet the Vote movement, and a few commenting on Twitter’s fall from grace. The latter group comprise of more early adopters and uber-bloggers — the same people that made up Twitter’s early core userbase. But is their opinion a consensus in the online world? At this point, I’d say no. They’re loud and they tend to be influencers, to it seems like the idea of the end-of-Twitter is a lot more mainstream than it actually is; people are still using it and loving it.
As I explore Twitter’s so-called imminent demise, I’ve decided to check out some of its competitors that have popped up and see what all the fuss is about.
Facebook Mobile: I use this all the time on my Blackberry, and my status update is easily updated to those on my friends list — it’s less organized than Twitter though, which relies on simplicity.
Jaiku: I pretty much hate Jaiku and no one is really considering it a Twitter competitor at this point because well, there’s not that much of a difference. It’s an invite-only beta and was purchased by Google last year, so we’ll keep an eye out on it.
Plurk: Pretty much the same as Twitter except geared towards a younger crowd, offering “karma points” to those who use the site frequently.
identi.ca: Essentially an open-source Twitter.
FriendFeed: FriendFeed isn’t necessarily a true competitor since it’s an aggregator (so you even feed your tweets through it too), but that doesn’t mean it will stay that way.
The only one I really use out o these is Facebook Mobile, and I use it for a different function than I use Twitter (I don’t really get any news from Facebook…it’s more “oh, nice, so and so had a cookie today”). Plus, you have to check out Facebook to get your updates — Twitter pushes them to you.
For my next and final post, I’m talking to some of these bloggers who are convinced Twitter’s going down to see if I can go a little bit deeper.
5 Comments
Obviously, the people who are really into blogging know about Twitter at all because something about it intrigued them in the first place. I would be interested to know what they observed about Twitter in it’s “prime” (if it had one), and what they noticed happening to it as it declined.
Twitter is a great tool for sharing your thoughts. Agreed. I’m not very familiar with the Twitter competitors though, with the exception of Facebook Mobile. But, it seems to me that the way people express themselves on Facebook is different than on Twitter, where messages are short and concise.
I wonder if that’s the case — if the difference in syntax amounts to anything. Also, what’s nice about Twitter is that you can follow blogs, NYTimes, and Barack Obama and random people. What do the others offer?
B”H
It seems like there is a real difference of formality and content among these different services. Is there really the possibility of a Twitter following to take it to Facebook level, in terms of network effects? I think there are really different demographics at work here.
I’m really interested in what makes sites appealing to different demographics. What makes one site more appealing to younger users? It’s something we spoke briefly about with online journals but never really dove too deep into. The one thing we said was that as the users got older the information we provided got shorter but all of these sites seems to focus on providing short blurbs.
Lynn, you make good point — though I wonder how much of it has to do with demographics and how much has to do with our online roles. There’s some great research done by Forrester on how you can categorize users into just a hierarchy of users. The most engaged are creators, then critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.
I’m wondering what happens to a loyal userbase that was made up originally of a lot of a few, influential creators, lots of critics and spectators, and has turned into something else now that it is made up of mostly creators, joiners, and spectators. Is this a trend overall for all new web apps/sites?