Twitter: Where Nobody Knows Your Name
by Kara Swisher
Posted on April 28, 2008 at 1:38 AM PT
So I was in Washington, D.C., this past weekend for a lovely wedding, traveling back to a city where I started my career and worked for 15 years after college.
And I conducted a little experiment among the more than 100 folks gathered for the wedding, all of whom were quite intelligent, armed with all kinds of the latest devices (many, many people had iPhones, for example) and not sluggish about technology.
They were also made up of a wide range of ages and genders, from kids to seniors.
And so I asked a large group of people–about 30–and here is the grand total who knew what Twitter was: 0
FriendFeed: 0
Widget: 1 (but she thought it was one of the units used in a business class study).
Facebook: Everyone I asked knew about it and about half had an account, although different people used it differently.
In other words, confirming for me what I wrote last week about the intense obsession with the hottest new services like Twitter and FriendFeed, in the echo chamber of Silicon Valley, and how no one else cares yet.
I wrote:
You don’t know?
Neither does most of the human race, in truth, which is just getting around to noticing Facebook and maybe, just maybe, figuring out how to properly use a SuperPoke (my advice: never ever!).”
While I really do like all these services, and use Twitter daily (and it is apparently getting more venture money), it is interesting to wonder when the delta is reached when early adopter interest meets mainstream attention.
Predictions?
Comments
Kara,
I always bristle when I see hang-wringing over Twitter, because a) I know much of their engineering team and b) when I see that their two top guys (Ev and Jack) have made priority #1 to get Twitter stable, reliable, and trustable, I know they are onto something.
It doesn’t matter how many people use Twitter proper. Twitter’s success will depend on their ability to sell the Twitter “product and experience” to internal networks for dispatch, messaging, and collaboration purposes. Sort of what we use it for, but more focused.
In this business, you can either sell a product, or monetize traffic. Unless you’re Google and do it in a way that doesn’t make your users feel stupid and sheep-like, the way to go is to take your concept and apply it to as many scenarios as possible. Imagine Facebook (circa 2006-7) as an internal HR took for massive organizations?
Monitization and advertising are the first impulse of the fool and last gasp of the desperate. If you build it, they will buy it, in one form or another.
Posted by Andrew Feinberg at April 28th, 2008 at 4:53 amI always survey clients and people I meet: (people other than technofolk) 1 -Do you read tech blogs? 2- Do you use a RSS reader? 3- Have you heard the term Web2.0? 4- Are you (business owners) familiar with Web Apps or the term, SAAS? 5- Do you use mobile access for email or Web? It is truly incredible what an insular bubble we in the tech business live in. Most folks are hard pressed, still, to understand the difference between a blog, a website, a widget, etc. Generational, perhaps?
At the supermarket:
Do you use Facebook? No, no, never heard of it.
9,456 people so far could not give a damn over any of this.
Posted by alan wilensky at April 28th, 2008 at 5:02 amMaking a householdword is the great challenge. Not only does the word need to be universally known, but it has to be universally known for something that people need. eBay, Amazon, Google, and Craigslist are universally known, and people need what those words mean: People need to buy & sell & search in their everyday lives. SecondLife is known, but people don’t need it; Flickr could be the word that means photography — the Kodak of the 21st century — but it’s wide value prop is fuzzy, and my non-tech friends still send me their crappy Shutterfly links. I’m highly suspicious of most startups’ potential to reach sustainable householdword status because they’re not really serving real people’s needs. As for Facebook, people need to stay in touch with people they know, so they’re on-track, but I suspect their word is too muddied with pokes & kid stuff.
Someone needs to write the “Crossing the Chasm” for this era.
posted here
Posted by Scott Heiferman at April 28th, 2008 at 7:27 amit’s a great point and the second challenge twitter has, after scaling, is to go mainstream.
many think it can’t happen.
i have been slowly but surely turning on my friends who don’t even use facebook to twitter.
none of them work in the tech world (easier to find friends like that in NYC)
i just tell them to text “follow fredwilson” to 40404 and when/if they get tired of it to text “leave fredwilson” to 40404
what’s interesting to me is that some really like it and have been using it with their friends
so i am optimistic, but also mindful that crossing the chasm is not easy and that twitter has a long way to go on multiple fronts in order to truly go mainstream
Posted by fred wilson at April 28th, 2008 at 8:17 amIt’ll catch on, Twitter is powerful. We need more than one vendor though. There was a time when blogs were like this, outside a few thousand people, no one knew about them, and now you’re asking this classic question on a blog. Seems a little ironic, but perfectly natural!
Posted by Dave Winer at April 28th, 2008 at 8:51 amAnd at a wedding in Silicon Valley, all the people would’ve been Twittering in the audience…to the pastor. And the bride and groom.
Posted by Graeme Thickins at April 28th, 2008 at 9:09 ammmm.. i predict twitter “mainstreams” in ~2-3 years, friendfeed in ~3-4 years.
(altho my guess is both get acquired / integrated into something else before then).
would have been interesting to ask about Digg, which i think has already crossed over a bit.
(ps – i twittered the birth of our second child, including 3 cervix dilation updates… NERD!
Posted by dave mcclure at April 28th, 2008 at 9:46 amFunny timing, Kara. I just read this article a few minutes after typing this on twitter: “talked to some non-bay-area folks about online stuff this weekend. nobody has any clue about what’s considered “standard” out here, haha. 10 minutes ago from web”
The layers of the onion for a lot of these services go something like tech bloggers and bay area tech industry/bay area people/tech people outside bay area/”information workers” outside bay area/rest of the world.
That’s a lot of layers to get through. And I’m not just referring to this re: leading/bleeding edge techie stuff like twitter or friendfeed. Services like Yelp and OpenTable that many of us take for granted out here as the default places to check out restaurants and make reservations are completely unknown to most people I talk to who don’t live out here.
Posted by Deva Hazarika at April 28th, 2008 at 10:27 amI couldn’t agree more that Silicon Valley is not like the rest of the world. I live in the Boston area, and I have attended many business meetings, conferences and things like them, with people who work all day long for businesses that have a prominent Web presence, and the people I talk to have never heard of Twitter. I am not convinced that this is a service that’s going mainstream. Of course, many Twitter users would say that they are glad about that. In my opinion, the reasons that Twitter won’t won’t be adopted by the general Internet user is because too hard to communicate what it is, and the learning curve is a bit too steep. http://www.16thletter.com/2008.....g-problem/
Posted by Melissa Chang at April 28th, 2008 at 10:38 amI can think of no more convenient way to be updated when Jonathan Coulton is stuck at an airport or tending to a child’s illness. Twitter does seem to fill a space between the IM and the blog or forum, and the 140 character limit might actually help people write tight. But I am surprised how many tech savvy people I know haven’t warmed to it yet.
Posted by Fred Leo at April 28th, 2008 at 10:56 amI live in the Boston area, have been in tech for a long time, and have been aware of Twitter since it launched (although I only started using it one month ago). I’m not necessarily amazed that more people haven’t heard of it, I’m still more impressed with how people are using it effectively (and I’m not sure that’s a huge number just yet).
For me, Twitter is one piece of social networking puzzle. By itself it’s ok, but combined with blogging, facebook, LinkedIn, etc, it suddenly becomes much more powerful. And maybe that’s why it hasn’t risen to the mainstream. It takes a lot of work to build (and effectively use) a strong social network, one that yields actual results.
I’m working on building a very focused network. And so far, it’s working very well. Especially during major industry events — I was at NAB in Vegas 2 weeks ago and was very impressed with the Twitter network. It quickly became an invaluable tool for me on the show floor.
But until it becomes easier, more obvious, etc, it won’t go mainstream. I’m not saying that won’t happen, I’m saying it’s not there yet. As with everything in tech, we’ll see convergence with capabilities coming together and with more intuitive features and UIs.
IMHO
Posted by Kevin Bourke at April 28th, 2008 at 11:17 amLiving in San Francisco and Silicon Valley gives you an incredibly clouded judgment to the phenomenon of social media compared to the rest of the world.
Story:
I was at a party in San Francisco. It was one of those phenomenons where Loic Le Meur (Seesmic) says I’m having a dinner and in response 150 people show up. The attendees were a complete list of who’s who of Internet fame: top bloggers, entrepreneurs, journalists, video bloggers, etc.
I run into an entrepreneur from Montreal. He’s in the Bay Area for the week pitching his new recruiting web site. I ask him, “How often does an event like this happen in Montreal?”
“Never,” he says.
These live events combined with our use of these social media tools, like Twitter, is what’s caused such an insular community in the SF Bay Area. We think because it’s happening here everyone is affected by it, but they’re not. Depending on how you look at it, we’re either fortunate or unfortunate.
David
Posted by David Spark at April 28th, 2008 at 11:54 amPure crossing the chasm action Kara. The echo chamber are the early adopters. If you listen to them, you will fall into the chasm. What dooms companies is an addiction to their own customer base – there are larger segments out there that have never heard of you, but you ignore them.
* Facebook = out of the student population in Boston MA – that is across the chasm.
* YouTube = clearly across the chasm.
* MySpace = out of LA, a hit with mucisians and their fans = across the chasm.
* HotOrNot = obviously across the chasm.
* Twitter = has a chance.
* Friendfeed = not a chance.
Twitter is smart enough to know that keeping their service useful for general audience means keeping it simple and not necessarily hipping it up.
Friendfeed is like Friendster. It is for dorks. I am sure they are nice people, but they are nice google engineers who are out to wow cool the industry. I wonder if Socialthing has a chance with the youth set – they don’t sound that dorky to me. Friendfeed = not a chance.
Although as you pointed out in your post, most Internet users barely know how to SuperPoke, and such aggregators are like third-level derivatives of things that people might actually use. I strongly doubt they have a chance but Socialthing might be a flexible company able to deliver something else.
Posted by Srini Kumar at April 28th, 2008 at 2:08 pma few more points – sorry !
* If twitter figures out how to monetize without alienating users, they will be internally motivated to capture more users and might invest in a marketing campaign to cross the chasm.
Posted by Srini Kumar at April 28th, 2008 at 2:18 pm* Twitter might be integrated into smartphones (not just iPhones either) in the future. I know that’s how I found out about Yelp, and it probably would work wonders for Twitter.
* Twitter gives any future social network a News Feed with zero coding effort. Their developers are keen to see other developers integrating Twitter and one of these OTHER services may become a hit.
* Cynicism about Twitter has been proven wrong again and again. The market is wide open for them and they have engineered it so that anyone faster than them should integrate them as a matter of course. It must be very exciting to be part of Twitter right now… even their backend difficulties prove they are solving problems other firms don’t have yet.
I think Twitter’s ultimate biz model is about influence… figuring out a way to track and reach the influencer crowds. It may never be mainstream, but if you could give marketers a way to track what insiders, bloggers, etc. are talking about, there’s value there. Use the “track” feature and pick out a brand… it’s interesting to not only see what those people are talking about, but to think about how connected the avg Twitter user is to a wider audience and the potential influence they may have over others.
Posted by Charlie O'Donnell at April 28th, 2008 at 2:24 pmAs a Silicon Valley outsider (but fellow techie) it is amusing to sit back and watch the echo chamber effect of tech media. The world that shows up in my feeds is COMPLETELY out of touch with the world I live in. And while the geek in me loves reading about the latest developments, the pragmatist in me is glad my environment isn’t that schizophrenic.
I think the best thing Twitter has going for it (and its best chances for success) is its simplicity and scope. It has essentially one function and it handles that purpose very well (well not counting the frequent downtime.)
The big problem is, so do a lot of other great networking sites/services. Flickr is a prime example. Even though Yahoo (it doesn’t get any more mainstream than that) owns Flickr and has pushed it to the forefront as its main image service, it still lies somewhere in that voodoo land between mainstream adoption and niche service. Most people I know of in the general populace have at least heard of Flickr now. But only a small minority of my non-geek real world acquaintances actually use it.
Sticking with the Flickr example, I don’t think the uptake on a lot these web 2.0 services is generational either as even my younger tech-savvy cousins often prefer to just upload their pictures to Facebook rather than put them up on Flickr. I could easily see something similar happening to Twitter. When showing Twitter to my txt-messaging crazy brother, he said “why would I want to do that when I can already do the same thing with my Facebook status?” Most here realize the differences between the two services, but the point is not without merit when looking at it from an average joe’s perspective. Even a great service may not make the mainstream if there’s not enough to differentiate it from an already popular service.
Posted by Glados Latrop at April 28th, 2008 at 3:06 pmTwitter has enormous opportunity in front of them to choose from a number of different directions/biz models. I see the service as having similar growth potential to a Wordpress. Its easy to use, fun, and is the first tool to really enable fluid and dynamic online conversations. It’s a hybrid of IM, comments, blogging in one. It also levels the field and allows direct access moreso than previous communication platforms have done. This is, after all, one of the great selling points of the web, mass democratization of media, and Twitter takes a big leap forward in this regard. Some of the revenue opportunities are obvious – like text ads, premium offerings, integration on other platforms. Matt does a good job of outlining a few of them in his comment here: http://www.alleyinsider.com/20....._it_worth_
Posted by Josh Guttman at April 28th, 2008 at 3:57 pm@Charlie O’Donnell,
Take a look at our tool:
http://twist.flaptor.com
for example, check out how much people talk about Facebook and Myspace, and see what they are saying:
http://twist.flaptor.com/?gram.....how+trends
Posted by Diego Basch at April 28th, 2008 at 4:13 pmTwitter is clearly penetrating the early-adopter and influencer crowd.
Check out this data. We did a survey last week –> Of the first 1650 people in our invite-only alpha for socialmedian, nearly 60% are daily twitter users.
[click through for pretty graph]
http://blog.socialmedian.com/2....._time.html
The only service that scored higher is Facebook.
Posted by Jason Goldberg at April 29th, 2008 at 9:02 amAll social media is only useful when it has an impact that is measurable. How do people measure the impact of Twitter, FreindFeed, or many of the other greatly hyped applications out there? If an organization cannot understand through metrics why the feature helps, it is only “cool to have.” And “cool to have” doesn’t get budget…
Out here in the hinterlands outside of Silicon Valley, we sometimes see that the King is wearing no clothes.
Posted by Mike Rowland at April 29th, 2008 at 12:25 pmThis is why I don’t go to weddings
Posted by Seth Gottlieb at April 29th, 2008 at 6:22 pmBut dont for get due to some “Questionable Things” that the FFC did. The US Mobile market is still lagging europe especialy in SMS usage.
And I am not sure how represenative DC is its the home of the american Sir humpfrys who have interns to do that sort of thing
Posted by Maurice Walshe at April 30th, 2008 at 5:14 amIn these things you will find that some sites will catch on for a large number of people and not at all with others. Take blogging for instance, 4 years ago blogging was new and innovative but now it is acceptable and widely spread yet if you did a survey of the number of people who actually blog the percentage would be very small.
New technology will catch on but it won’t be mainstream for a very long time.
Posted by John Fearon at April 30th, 2008 at 12:53 pmBy the way I saw this article in Freakonomics blog and then again in my mate Vinny’s blog, so your definitely in the right circles!
Posted by John Fearon at April 30th, 2008 at 12:59 pmGreat point. We sometimes forget that 99% of the world’s population don’t know, or often, don’t care about what may be hot in the tech sphere today. Forget Twitter. What amazes me is that the overwhelming majority of mainstream, savvy web users still don’t know what RSS is. Setting up feed readers? Not a chance.
Posted by Shafqat Islam at April 30th, 2008 at 2:45 pmKara,
Today I was passed links to two different articles, yours and another taking a similar position over at The Buzz Bin.
Last summer there was a lot of hype in the naval-gazing tech blogsphere about “Social Media Overload”. When I joined the conversation, I took the position that only people that worked in the business of social media and new media marketing would make such complaints, that the average person, even tech savvy, had never heard of Twitter, much less Pounce or Jaiku or any of the other operations further below the radar.
I received a lot of criticism, and was roundly poo-poo. I posted my own contribution to that conversation on my blog in July:
GigantiCo – Social Media Overload?
Matt Dickman of Techno-Marketer honored it with a thoughtful reply.
I now feel somewhat vindicated.
Thank you for your post.
Best regards,
Posted by Chris Grayson at May 1st, 2008 at 1:57 amChris
I teach several times a year at places like Baruch & NYU and almost always find that the students usually don’t spend all that much time on the things we talk about in the industry all the time. Last year, while we talked about Second Life as if it was the savior of the ad industry, most of the students I spoke with either didn’t know what Second Life was or, if they did, spent very little time in SL. While more of them know twitter, they’re not really using it all the time and certainly not nearly as often as we in the industry do. In fact, I was meeting with a colleague from Amsterdam and his complaint about twitter was that it was all industry people using it there. Maybe we just spend enough time with the real world!
Posted by David Polinchock at May 2nd, 2008 at 6:09 pm