Twitter, the flawed genius? You decide

Oct.31.2009 Discussions

Twitter is becoming part of the fabric of search
Deals announced in the past couple of days will soon see status updates/ tweets added to the search results of both Microsoft’s Bing and Google search result pages (SERP). The sheer volume of information being entered in to twitter every minute has long been eyed up by the likes of Microsoft and Google as it offers them ‘real time’ search through topic trends, an area that even Google has publicly admitted it is lagging behind. This deal with twitter will give them access to instant and constantly evolving information their spiders could never hope to compete with, and it gives twitter its first major source of revenue!

It has its own eco-system
An entire eco-system has sprung up using the twitter platform such as twitter alerts, tweet scheduling, back tweet analysis, polls, group tweets, pictures, backgrounds, advertising… the list goes on. The more developers that come on board to create new tools and applications based upon Twitter’s platform the more likely people are going to find a use for it.

The sheer size of its user base
When it comes down to it, the number of people who use Twitter is massive! Although growth has started to slow down, it still pulls in close to 25 million unique visitors from the USA alone, as shown by compete.com’s unique visitor statistics.

Should you be on Twitter?
A lot of webmasters and business have jumped on board Twitter without really asking why? As with any form of marketing, be it newspapers, Email marketing, or paid search, Twitter is not suitable for everyone. But the reasons why you should not be on Twitter should be based upon those factors and not because you think it will have gone by 2010. It is important to understand Twitter is now firmly established as a major source of traffic for websites, a revenue generator for supporting businesses and is soon to become a vital source of data for the search engines so any question of whether it is simply a short term fad should be dismissed.

Or Is It?

Too bad the real story of the company is one of top-to-bottom incompetence.

‘Twas always thus. Twitter was never really a company; it was a feature invented at another forgotten startup, spun off into its own venture. The programmer who came up with the idea for Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was named CEO, while Twitter’s better-known backer, Ev Williams, a Webhead who struck it rich by selling Blogger to Google five years ago, dithered about how much he wanted to be involved.

Despite Williams’ seeming indifference, Twitter took off — so much so that a crush of new users strained its servers, to the point that the service became famous for its technical incompetence. (The “fail whale,” a cheery cetacean icon displayed when Twitter’s website was unavailable, now appears on T-shirts in San Francisco and Brooklyn.)

In its business affairs, too, Twitter is proving incompetent. Most Web 2.0 startups run cheaply, but Twitter faces large bills from mobile-phone companies which charge it for forwarding text messages to mobile phones; the more it grows, the more it pays. And it has yet to announce publicly a way to make money.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have a scheme. The latest one we’ve heard floated: Twitter would charge companies to have verified Twitter feeds, so users would know that a message from, say, ExxonMobil really came from the oil company. (It’s not as hypothetical as it sounds; a Twitter user inexplicably impersonated ExxonMobil this summer.) Verified accounts might then pay Twitter for every message they send, and also get prominent listing in a Twitter directory.

If that sounds like utter nonsense, the fever-dream imaginings of a desperate business-development executive high on whiteboard-marker fumes, that’s because it is.

With no real hope of making money on its own, Twitter’s best hope is a buyout. But its executives have handled that poorly, too. Dorsey botched talks with Yahoo and then Facebook; he didn’t even tell his own board of directors he was talking to Facebook about a proposed $500 million acquisition. After that, he was fired as CEO and replaced by Williams, but stayed on as chairman, a nominal job which doesn’t require his presence at the Twitter office. One prominent Silicon Valley investor is fuming that Dorsey is still on the payroll at all.

So this apparently “Mickey Mouse ” operation is the future of news? That’s not the most frightening prospect. Even if Twitter were competently run and profitable, the end result is an unreadable jumble. Look closely at the coverage, if you can call it that, of the Mumbai attacks on Twitter. Sitting at their desks, most people had nothing to add except to observe that Mumbai used to be called Bombay — the kind of message that makes you wish Twitter’s length limit was zero characters, not 140.

As more users join, the Twitter feed becomes filled with more and more noise; repetitive retweetings, back-scratching praise, and self-congratulation. A set of amateurs celebrating each other not for the quality or insight of their reporting, but its brevity, swiftness, and modish form of delivery.

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