Is Twitter Dead? Yes and No | Hacker News Reader

Is Twitter Dead? Yes and No

enewslatest.com

22 pointsAnon8420 comments

Twitter will never be the new facebook for a very simple reason: Facebook is conceived so that people that have nothing of interesting to say (a huge percentage, sadly) can still tell a lot of useless things, post photos, take a quiz, comment some stupid thing about the status of somebody else.

Twitter instead is designed for people that have something to say (otherwise no-one will follow you given that there is no the reciprocal bit) and are even able to say it in 140 chars.

As a twitter user I'm very glad of this, since I hope that staying an elite thing twitter will continue to be interesting and worth to use. My claim is that also twitter owners should be happy about this. In the long run it can be more interesting to have 1% of the users but with good content than 99% of users that don't pay a dollar and produce things that are not of interest.

That is complete nonsense. People may have nothing interesting to say to you but photos, events, statuses etc are interesting to their friends. And this is easy to prove: Facebook is one of the stickiest websites around, people keep coming back, whereas as the article points out, Twitter users rapidly lose interest. And that's because Twitter is for people who don't have enough to say to sustain an actual blog.

They lose interest because Twitter is more of a tool than an activity, and Facebook serves to fill all activity and tool roles it can fill.

A tool to do what? Get some hype from bored-at-work followers?

I've never really used facebook much, but the few facebook friends I have (who are friends in real life, but live far away) seem to confirm the claim of the original comment: 90% of their "status updates" result from some Facebook game or other "take a quiz", "ten things you didn't know about me" and so on.

The 90% are taken straight from the Twitter study, so they must be true.

A 140 character message is not always enough to give a complete thought. Complete thought-based communication is more important than bursts of small messages that give rise to the digg bar and cause the craving for more and more communication because you are not really getting true interaction with the other person.

On the other hand I love how someone posted on facebook that they are going on vacation and had their house broken into since people knew no one was there.

O well Twitter and Facebook still baffle me, no idea why people use them.

The sign up process they desibe is right on. You show up, don't see anything, leave, and a while later (maybe months) you come back and it clicks.

Twitter is so vibrant I expect string growth next month, but the absurd speed from the best media coverage possible was clearly unsustainable.

This is actually a pretty decent article, despite the exaggerated, link-bait title. Worth a read, some interesting analysis.

Twitter will go the way of facebook, which of course will go the way of myspace, which of course is about to go the way of friendster, which went the way of pets.com, and so on and so forth all the way until we get back to tulips.

I think handholding for new users is a serious problem. It might have killed Second Life - at least to me it simply was too complicated to get a decent looking avatar and find interesting things to do. I had some fun experiences in SL, but ultimately it was too difficult to get orientation.

Hope Twitter won't see the same fate - their "recommended users to follow" thing is definitely not cutting it yet. Then again, for the mainstream users, some starlets to follow might be just the thing.

Second Life has no intrinsic value that I can see. Twitter does; it's persistant, searchable, real-time communication.

SL could be a pretty good playground. I would have liked to create games for it. I guess stuff like the alife island (forgot the name) were pretty cool, too. A lot of creativity took place.

A couple of days I logged into SL again, and the only places with people in them seemed to be the escort services :-( (I looked at the map and just zoomed into places with many people present, and they always were escort agencies, I think).

I think an underrated problem is that new users are all greeted with these directions: "... answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

I bet that fewer than 10% of the interesting tweets I've read involved what the author was doing. But this quote leads to the mistaken public perception that twitter is just a bunch of people talking about what they had for breakfast. Many new users send out one or two boring tweets, assume everyone else is doing the same, and give up on it -- much like how the author described his original Twitter experience.

I'm not sure what a better prompt would be -- maybe "What are you thinking?", or nothing at all. Regardless, I'm sure they could make a sizable impact on public perception and newbie usage patterns by changing that quote.

Twitter died for me when the marketing people started trying to take advantage of it. now all I get is constant follow requests from self proclaimed 'internet marketing experts', most of which have only signed up in the past couple of weeks and clearly don't really have a clue about the true value of Twitter since all they do is post links to the same get rich quick articles over and over again.

“Los muertos que vos matasteis gozan de buena salud”. -- Don Juan Tenorio

Twitter is where all the IRC people now are.

I think that the twitter and irc people are two very different categories of netizens that almost don't overlap.

I can anecdotally disagree with that...in fact, the only reason I got a Twitter thingy after resisting for about two years is because the crowd in my IRC hangouts incessantly refer to "tweets."

Twitter is certainly not a replacement for IRC in these circles either, though, merely an extra tool. It is not well-suited for it, not least because support for anything like real-time conversations between multiple people is almost completely absent -- which I think the correct design decision.

Bizarrely, some of the non-IRC people are trying to sell Twitter as some kind of a chatroom, see for example this recent TIME Magazine article:

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604,00.....

Edit: tautology.

I use both. In fact, I can think of at least 12 people off the top of my head who use both. They're not mutually exclusive, after all.

I've got at least 10 friends who use both, but what I've mainly found is that my old friends who used to IRC back in the 90's and have since left, enjoy twitter. They like it because it's like IRC, but you don't have to give it 100% of your attention to keep up with the conversation. We refer to it a slow version of IRC where the channel never closes.

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