Kevin Patrick

The Death of Twitter?

My father sent me an op article today on the death of twitter. It was written by Mark Hornung who is a senior vice president of the Bernard Hodes Group. Published on ere.net, one of the premier online communities for recruiters, with more than 95,000 unique visitors per month.

Mark makes lots of good points, and I can personally attest to the massive spam (ha.. twam!) infusion that has spiked over the past few months. Twitter is actively taking actions against this and seems to be making strides. They are also starting to add some automated support for this to allow the user community to moderate twammers. If they can alleviate this problem and their business plan right, I think the service will continue to be viable.

It sure would have simplified things if Facebook would have gobbled them up a few months back.  The Facebook profile page does all the stuff twitter can do sans the public time line search.  I would also venture to say that it seems to offer a better platform to start introducing more video support over the coming months.

Let’s fast forward 12-24 months to higher speed 3G or LTE cell networks.  This is closer than we think… handsets start having a camera on the phone face for video conferencing. Google’s already built a top notch conferencing solution into GMail, which has been an easy integration into Android phones. Apple’s iChat will be a likely competitor, especially if the next or future-gen iPhone is equipped. If not the iPhone, then certainly their upcoming “Apple Pad” that has been heavily speculated as of late.

There is even buzz that the iPhone 3.0 update may enable video capabilities on 1st gen and 3G iphones with the software release in June. Consider this: 17.4 million iphones sold through 1Q this year… what happens, from a social perspective, if that many people instantly have a video camera that they can put anything they want directly on the web at anytime, from any place?

I guess my question is: does adding the video component have the potential to be a huge spam-combat tool and increase the overall value of the social network? I don’t know. It takes a little over 2 minutes to watch ten 12 second video status updates on 12seconds.tv. I can scan and read 10 tweets in a matter of seconds.

I will say, through my very limited use of 12seconds.tv, that the “feeling of connectivity” is immensely greater than 140 characters of text. The ability to instantly connect with others in a visual manner is more appealing.  The average person would be able to connect in a more _ manner than with simple text. From a product marketing angle, a short clip of me drinking some of my Adagio Teas and exclaiming how enjoyable it is is more valuable than a short textual quip “love this new @AdagioTeas tea set!” Or is it?

Hornung closes the article perfectly and is completely right: regardless of the platform, its just another part of your communications plan.

1990 was easy: Phone, fax, snail mail.
2000 added in email, which was and still is fraught with spam.
2009: It’s getting damn crowded in here! Consider the accounts I have with “communication” services:
flickr for photos, youtube for video, Vimeo for video, facebook, linkedin, 12seconds, twitter, twitpic, blog… whew.

No doubt: there will be ones that evolve and prosper and those that live and die. Will twitter be one of the major players that fosters human-to-human social interaction, or will it just become an abbreviated aggregation stream of links to every man/woman/child/car/dog/cat/company/government’s web activity? I can tell you that as of today it is becoming more of the latter for me, but time will tell.  I think the key will be how they decide to monetize the service.

Read the original article here

Your thoughts? Light up the comment section.