Over the past few months, the Twitter bandwagon has been getting increasingly crowded. This has caused an exponential amount of noise – good and bad – within the Twittersphere, and a growing amount of chatter about Twitter.
While more “noise” can be expected, what I find particularly interesting is Twitter’s popularity is already causing a backlash. Last week, MSNBC’s Helen Popkin had a story called “OMG! Shut up about Twitter already”, talking about how there’s so much inanity on Twitter.
She described Twitter as the “Snuggie” of the social media world because “Everyone’s yammering about it endlessly and busting out his or her own Twitter feed as awkwardly as wearing a blanket with sleeves”.
Then, you had Jon Stuart and Samantha Bee take the piss out of Twitter with a hilarious skit that saw Samantha talk about fictional Twitter-like services called Grunter (where you could update through grunts), and Stalker (where stalkers could follow you).
And now it seems the digerati may be having its fill with Twitter at the SXSW conference where the amount of Twitter traffic has become a cacophony. There’s so much information coming down the pike that many people are finding it difficult to find useful information about what to do, who to see and where to eat at the conference. (via CNet)
All these problems are nice to have because they’re growing pains. The challenge will be creating tools that meet these pains. Two areas that might get a lot of attention in 2009 from third-parties may be noise filters – services that intelligently eliminate inane updates (e.g. remove any mentions about lunch or coffee”) or smarter, easy-to-create groups.
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The Dangers of a Twitter Tsunami
Over the past few months, the Twitter bandwagon has been getting increasingly crowded. This has caused an exponential amount of noise – good and bad – within the Twittersphere, and a growing amount of chatter about Twitter.
While more “noise” can be expected, what I find particularly interesting is Twitter’s popularity is already causing a backlash. Last week, MSNBC’s Helen Popkin had a story called “OMG! Shut up about Twitter already”, talking about how there’s so much inanity on Twitter.
She described Twitter as the “Snuggie” of the social media world because “Everyone’s yammering about it endlessly and busting out his or her own Twitter feed as awkwardly as wearing a blanket with sleeves”.
Then, you had Jon Stuart and Samantha Bee take the piss out of Twitter with a hilarious skit that saw Samantha talk about fictional Twitter-like services called Grunter (where you could update through grunts), and Stalker (where stalkers could follow you).
And now it seems the digerati may be having its fill with Twitter at the SXSW conference where the amount of Twitter traffic has become a cacophony. There’s so much information coming down the pike that many people are finding it difficult to find useful information about what to do, who to see and where to eat at the conference. (via CNet)
All these problems are nice to have because they’re growing pains. The challenge will be creating tools that meet these pains. Two areas that might get a lot of attention in 2009 from third-parties may be noise filters – services that intelligently eliminate inane updates (e.g. remove any mentions about lunch or coffee”) or smarter, easy-to-create groups.
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