Twitter: Where Nobody Knows Your Name–The Sequel
by Kara Swisher
Posted on December 29, 2008 at 6:00 AM PT
BoomTown’s been just one week gone and yet another goofy, traffic-generating debate “erupts” in the blogosphere, involving the usual suspects.
(Hey, it’s Loïc Le Meur and Michael Arrington again, fresh from their equally meaningful Are-French-folks-lazy-or-what? debate!)
This time, while the Mideast burns and the economy continues its meltdown, they and many others are going at it about the favored hyped Silicon Valley company of the moment, Twitter.
The new bone being gnawed on is something I can hardly grasp the point of–some drivel argument about what constitutes the authority of a tweet.
While tweet status would seem only important to, say, a Warner Bros. cartoon character like Sylvester, all I can think is: Who cares?
While I know I seem to say this a lot these days, I guess I am not really clear why people can’t use these various Web tools in any way they like, without a bunch of tech pundits pushing their self-aggrandizing agendas.
You want to rank tweets? Fine–knock yourself out! You want to use tweets to tell your family about your trip to Buffalo? Maybe not so much, but what the heck!
I think, though, the real story is the endless echo chamber of Silicon Valley that seems to persist in overestimating the meaning of Twitter, especially compared to so much more that is going on in the tech industry.
With only about six million registered users (with a much lower number of active ones), Twitter gets written about as if it were a mover and shaker extraordinaire, instead of just being what it is: An interesting status-alert start-up that makes zero revenues and turned down a very large buyout offer from another once-too-overhyped start-up (Facebook).
Well, after yet another week in the real world, I am here to tell you, precious few people still have any clue what Twitter is or how it works.
This is not to say Twitter is not useful or cool or that its growth is not impressive. All that is true about the service.
But the fact remains that Twitter is simply an unknown to most average people in a way other tech trends have not been.
The last time I did a What-the-Heck-Is-Twitter? experiment was in April and it went as follows:
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.”
This time, I asked yet another group of about 40 folks, in New York, Scranton and Buffalo, many of whom were young people and all of whom used the Internet regularly.
Those who knew what Twitter was: 3 (two only because they’d read about it being used in the Mumbai terror attacks).
Those who could actually explain how it worked and had used it: 1 (a journalist, natch!).
Friendfeed: 0 (even my family had not bothered to look at my recent post on the cool start-up).
Widget: 25, except most people now call them apps and are talking about using them in an Apple (AAPL) iPhone or an iPod Touch. Everyone was surprisingly knowledgeable, especially younger people, about apps for smartphones.
Facebook: 40–a perfect score, and almost everyone I talked to had a Facebook profile, which accounts for its huge growth to more than 140 million users worldwide.
You get the idea–while the digerati have moved away from Facebook as an important trendsetter, I am thinking that perhaps its time has just started.
Not that I have the tweet authority to say so or anything.
Comments
I could do the same poll about AllThingsD and probably get the same results, you know. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important. In fact, many people are influenced by Twitter and don’t even know it… because if it’s influencing me and I’m an influencer in my own little analog community, that makes it more powerful.
PS… The company is two years old. Historically, it used to take 5-7 years to build a successful and sustainable business. What were Google’s revenues after two years from the day Larry and Sergei started working on it?
Posted by Charlie O'Donnell at December 29th, 2008 at 6:57 amIf I want to control the actions of those around me, do I have to prove I have authority? It’s great that we are removing obstacles to control.
Posted by terri boothe at December 29th, 2008 at 8:12 amSometimes tweets can be much more effective than blog posts. I like reading your work, but this article required a lot of reading to say very little. First of all, it took way too long to even state the issue. Fun banter is great to have in your style but it appears as though this post was all fun and banter and no much else.
Also, if you would try to get into a Twitter a bit more, you might find that many people have become really good at saying much more in 140 characters than you were able to say here in this very long blog post.
Not meaning to be critical of you, just being critical of your work in this case.
Andrew
Posted by andrew baron at December 29th, 2008 at 8:30 amThank you Kara, for writing this article! Its getting to be a bit much with Twitter. While I think the idea is cool:
- Its not really going to mean anything to me until all of my friends are on it, and I have a way of communicating with only the ones I wish.
- It seems that the people who really understand ‘the power’ of twitter are the self aggrandizing and spammers (who I think twitter should make their source of revenue).
- Its mentioned far too often in the digital press, and I’m sick of hearing about it.
… and to boot, I think friendfeed is far more interesting; Facebook Connect too! but you dont really hear much about those now do you.
Posted by Daniel Stern at December 29th, 2008 at 8:32 am“Hey, it’s Loïc Le Meur and Michael Arrington again” this is inaccurate Kara, this time we agree with Mike, no debate between us
Posted by Loic Le Meur at December 29th, 2008 at 8:39 amA good number of people may not formally use Twitter with a mobile device but update their status through Facebook.
It would be interesting to see how many “breaking news” tweets turn out to be true and how many are strictly based on someone’s incorrect perception of a situation.
Twitter is an interesting tool that has it’s limits. I’m interested in seeing what my network does in terms of big picture things. But I don’t need to know that you’re eating cereal.
Posted by Ken Okel at December 29th, 2008 at 8:56 amso true Kara, but 3 is a step in the right direction. i just got to paris and a friend in NYC who has no clue what twitter is sent me an email with things to do in paris and one of the things on her list was a person to follow on twitter while we are in paris
twitter.com/parlerparis
so even people who don’t know what twitter is are taking advantage of it
that’s because twitter is more like a blog than a social net
anyway, you are right. way too much talk about it compared to its user base. but that’s could be a “tell” as they say on wall street
i hope so
Posted by fred wilson at December 29th, 2008 at 9:13 amI’m a pragmatist when it comes to emerging technology myself, but the study of 1000+ “connected consumers” that we conducted at Razorfish in ‘08 has much more optimistic numbers for both Twitter and other social media services.
Stats here:
http://feed.razorfish.com
Twitter inflection point discussion here:
http://is.gd/bbHJ
Posted by garrick schmitt at December 29th, 2008 at 9:39 amC:
Oh, we’d do worse! But ATD is not being touted as the best thing since sliced bread by the echo chamber.
And the old Google-did-not-make-$$ argument! Unfortunately, so far that’s only worked for, um, Google!
Posted by Kara Swisher at December 29th, 2008 at 9:46 amT:
I am all for removing gatekeepers. Which is the point of how ridiculous this tweet authority is.
Posted by Kara Swisher at December 29th, 2008 at 9:47 amK:
I agree completely and it would be interesting.
Also silly touting how Twitter is the new breakthrough in news delivery.
What about cell phones?
Posted by Kara Swisher at December 29th, 2008 at 9:49 amF:
I am deeply impressed with Twitter and all instant status and news delivery stuff.
I just don’t think the hype cycle is a good idea for it.
The tell is exactly right.
Posted by Kara Swisher at December 29th, 2008 at 9:51 amThe issue is not is Twitter relevant or not – it is a question of degree. And I agree that the chatter far outweighs the impact.
Posted by Shripriya Mahesh at December 29th, 2008 at 10:10 amGreat post, Kara.
I use Twitter and perhaps 20% of my professional social network use it, while close to 0% of my personal network are Twitter users.
But a number of the non-Twits (?) reply regularly via Facebook to my Tweets and I would expect some of them to migrate in the coming year.
In the meantime, anything to keep the self-absorbed Tweeterati (Arrington, Scoble, Loic, etc) from determining who is an authority is a big win.
Posted by Barry Graubart at December 29th, 2008 at 10:17 amThose who believe that group should be the arbiters of “Twitter authority” should go back and re-read the posts they all penned in the days preceding the release of Iron Man (or Wall-E).
Hi Kara…enjoy your work.
Less than 24 hours ago I had a long lunch with friends that included the head of communications for a major premium audio company that happens to be located nearby.
I noticed that they had an “official” Twitter account that was used sparsely and somewhat awkwardly (no human identified with the account), so I brought the subject up.
She still didn’t really know what Twitter was. I had to explain the service (which is a heavy task at a table of zero users*), how it has grown, who is using it, etc.
They’re on Twitter. And had no idea why, really.
Nobody knows about it. It’s effectively a non-factor outside of the Valley tech industry, coastal artsy types, and niche SEO marketing folks.
That doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s a great service. I love it. But it’s just a blip on the radar at this point.
* The table also included the #2 morning radio guy in Indy (young local demo), and he also had no clue about the service. All Facebook, all the time for his crew.
Posted by Dave Johnston at December 29th, 2008 at 10:41 amYes, I’m following the Twitter movement and am listening to the hype and applaud the momentum. I’m just not seeing the hype match reality yet and there have been some solid articles (like Kara’s) on the subject. Yet if you speak out, you’re condemned for ‘not getting it.’ I see value in Twitter and its instant updates for sure. However, I’m a bit tired of getting followed by folks who want to sell me goods — mktg services, sex toys, etc — and actually continue to pitch me off Twitter when there’s nothing in my profile that would prompt a sales pitch of any kind. We’ll see if Twitter continues to be the next big thing or it falls into the hype camp of Second Life from a few years ago.
Posted by Kathy Keating at December 29th, 2008 at 12:23 pmTwitter.COM is just commercial twitter — it has no authority (a better paraphrase would be something like “babble”).
See also http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=twitter
nmw
Posted by Norbert Mayer-Wittmann at December 29th, 2008 at 12:59 pmYes, being the online media industry’s water cooler doesn’t mean that the part of the world that only uses one monitor at work will ever care enough to make the time for Twitter and the challenge remains that while it may hold a bunch of content with mainstream appeal in the aggregate (Mumbai/Election/Gaza citizen journalism) or specific application (Paris insider) it still takes a lot of heavy lifting at the right time to extract the content’s maximum value.
I would take Fred’s opinion a step further – not only is Twitter more like a blog than a social network, it’s best chance to succeed with a mass audience will be when they find more ways for that blog-like content to connect in a timely and efficient manner with users who don’t know that the content is there (or how to find it) and whose jobs don’t revolve around (or, egads, allow) constant chatter. While it may take a similar amount of effort to extract similarly valuable content from Facebook, at least there you can post pictures of your kids/dogs/vacations while waiting for it to appear.
Posted by Paul Marcum at December 29th, 2008 at 2:32 pmThis post seems awfully shortsighted. Twitter’s user base is doubtless larger than either Blogger’s or Flickr’s was at the same age. I think Flickr is an interesting parallel — for quite a while, it was dinged as a darling of the digerati, and it definitely parlayed its cache with the A-List geeks to build early buzz. But becaues it was so useful, and so good, it grew and grew, and ended up swallowing Yahoo! Photos.
I’m not too worried about Twitter.
Posted by Peter Merholz at December 29th, 2008 at 8:59 pmTwitter mainstream relevance in about 1-2 more years (getting closer). FriendFeed, maybe another 1-2 on top of that, altho i expect them to get bought out way before then.
now, your point about Facebook — how times change, Mrs. Facebook-Apps-Are-Useless-Toys-Herself!
you’re quite correct, it’s *waaaay* mainstream. and even making a noticeable amount of money, altho everyone seems to think they’re still worthless while they’re bringing in $250-300M in revenue.
i would agree that people are taking their eye off Facebook & considering them old news when things are just getting very interesting.
(all this aside, i’m still addicted to all 3 services)
Posted by dave mcclure at December 30th, 2008 at 3:24 amMaybe I’m misunderstanding the argument here. It seems to me that Twitter and Facebook are good at different things – and because of that, their audiences are different in both size and demographic.
Facebook is great for staying in touch with established friends/family. But I haven’t made a single NEW friend or business contact through it. With Twitter I’ve connected with hundreds of new people, some of whom have become friends or business connections. And they are not all or even primarily in the Silicon Valley echo chamber – I’m in Austin, TX and my Twitter followers are scattered throughout the country.
The ‘test’ of asking random groups proves nothing unless you assume that the two companies are direct competitors. Try it with ‘Microsoft’ and ‘Oracle’. Then go tell Larry Ellison that he’s a nobody outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber.
That said, I do agree that the un-hip-ness of Facebook as everyone and their grandmother (literally) signs up does bode well for their long-term prospects.
Posted by Russ Somers at December 30th, 2008 at 7:11 am