Twitter: Where Nobody Knows Your Name

kara.allthingsd.com

8 points·webwatch··4 comments

I was really excited about Twitter (and some similar apps with lots of buzz) and signed up, used the friend importer against all the supported apps I had an account with and...

Nothing.

FriendFeed? Same deal. Most of the people I've found have been from the public timeline or from HN. Only a few early adopter types that I know from work are starting to show up on Twitter and most of them never post--probably just checking it out.

I tell people "it's like asynchronous instant messaging with programmability and succinctness rules." I guess I'm not selling it right because that doesn't get much rise out of most people. FriendFeed is easier to explain, but a vast majority of people I know aren't at the complexity stage that makes it valuable. I'm not really there either, yet.

I definitely think that's the toughest hurdle for Twitter to overcome: there's not an easy way to explain its value to people who aren't already on it, and none of my friends (that aren't nerds) are using it.

This is one of the main reasons I moved to Boston, the #2 area for startups, rather than Silicon Valley, the #1. There's still a huge amount of web tech people around, but not as much of an echo chamber.

Its an interesting observation. Not many folks even in the tech industry have any idea about twitter. I guess twitter has become a marketing tool for scobleizers and jasons

Reply on news.ycombinator.com