The latest internet viral app appears to be Twitter, a messaging service that seems to be a hybrid of instant messenger, email and blog. It’s advertising says that it answers the simple question “What are you doing now?” What they don’t say is “And if you have no followers, no one cares.” I’ve been on for about a month now. I am up to 12 followers, 8 of whom are trying to sell me something. Of the remaining 4, at least 3 don’t respond to my Tweets, so I may, for the most part, be pissing down a well, as they say.
Here’s my best explanation of how Twitter works.
· You can follow anyone, absolutely anyone.
· Anyone can follow you, but they have to know you to find you in the first place
· You can respond to anyone you are following.
· Anyone who follows you will see your Tweets
Twitter has one substantial, fundamental flaw in my view. It presumes that you have a network of Twitter users to connect to. (If it continues to grow exponentially, you probably will, as more and more of your friends join). But let’s say that you join Twitter, ask a few of your friends if they use it yet, get mostly No for an answer. Can you use Twitter, and even if you can, is it relevant to you? Here are some of the things I’ve discovered.
Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have about 1.5 million followers between them. If you are a celebrity, all you have to do is join and let one of the many sites that tracks celeb users post your ID. Remember, your activity will be dependent not on whom you know, but who knows you. And I don’t mean personally. You can elect to follow anybody. When you do, you get their personal little messages right on your computer as if the 1.5 million of you are having a cozy little chat with them. Your chances of even having your tweet read by a celeb, much less responded to, much less have the celebrity think “You know, this one guy here, out of 876,980 responses, is quite a wag. I think I’ll follow him.” Are about, well, one in 1.5 million. So who do the celebrities follow? Easy. Other celebrities. It’s getting a littttllllle bit cliquish in here.
So what are we all left to do until we can coax a few friends to try it out? I mean, it’s really nice to know that the lead singer for one of the top bands in the world is making a fresh salad for lunch, but I’m really kind of looking for a little more out of Twitter than this, and that would even be cool if he knew me, because I could then respond with “Hey, don’t forget the arugula!” And we’d have a good laugh between us.
With MySpace, for example, you can publish a page with your profile and have hundreds of page views in a month. The same “search based on key word interests” exists in Twitter, but it doesn’t have a critical mass yet. Demi and Ashton’s number of followers is growing exponentially. Mine is growing arithmetically, one at a time. At this rate, by Christmas I’ll have 18. Also, the tendency (no names mentioned here) for celebs in this one sided environment to use their tweets as a bully pulpit is rich. You’ll see a bit of evangelizing, some channeling of Zig Ziglar, and a bit of condescension in these tweets.
Think of this as a metaphor. Right now, tweet activity is based on you creating your own network of users. For celebrities, it is more like a constantly refreshing personal billboard on a busy freeway. They are free to say anything they want sure that what they say will be read by literally 100s of thousands of people, but those people can’t interact in any real sense with a billboard. Merely drive by and read it. So for me, with my 4 followers, it’s a little like posting a billboard in my back yard. I can see it quite well, but that’s about it.
Until Twitter goes critical mass, I’ll just spend my time reading about celebrities changing the oil in their cars and renting movies. Occasionally, I’ll post my own Tweet to no one saying “If a tree falls in a forest…”
Later.
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