Scoble: Twitter etc are the next email

god i'm fucking sick of people who claim they have a crystal ball, especially when they don't write code.

no file extensions, no privacy/crypto, no room to actually develop an idea, doesn't plug and play with other services (web apps like highrise, scripts that process mbox files, cellphones, ...). yeah, it's an email killer alright. especially when you go to send a message and you're greeted by a LOLcat that says you can't do what you want to do because they're dumbasses who don't know how to make a rapidly growing service scale.

Personally, I don't think anything will truly replace email (at least not for many many years). Twitter is a nice fringe communication tool but simply that. Hopefully what Twitter and the new communication apps will contribute to is a reduction in the number of pointless short emails I get. Perhaps the article should be titled, Twitter is the new IM.

Given how much noise Twitter generates in the Valley ecosystem, I was surprised to find out it only has something like 300-400K users (I can't find a reference right now, please correct me if I'm wrong - Compete seems to support that number though).

To me Twitter is the perfect example of the echo chamber.

Anecdotally, Scoble once linked to a blog post of mine in his twitter linkblog and I think I got only two or three clickthroughs from it. So even though he may have 4000 users, measuring the value of a twitter follower is very different from measuring the value of a pageview. What exactly does it mean for one person to have more digital presence than another? What exactly is that worth? It seems like it will take a few years for these questions to get fully worked out.

Nonsense!

Twitter is the next distraction.

business memoranda:email::twaddle:twitter