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.
Technorati Tags: jon stewart, twitter, verizon
7 Comments
Why not address the issue at the source? Sure you can make tools to filter and organize, which is a good idea at any rate, but why don’t the twitterati lead by example and set a cultural direction that emphasize increasing the signal to noise ratio?
I don’t care what Dave McClure or Jeremiah Owyang ate for lunch, I want to know what they’re thinking and that’s why I follow them – they don’t bombard followers with trivial tweets.
If more people took this ‘focus on quality’ approach, potentially going with a slower rate of tweets but with more quality, Twitter might make more sense to more people.
Unquestionably, the noise rises as the popularity increases..the digerati need to now focus on applications to provide context for getting a new generation of professionals to encourage executive leadership to put social media tools to work. to innovate, practice, train, and hire….thank you for a great post.
Here's a little hint. Stop following people who don't use twitter conversationaly. That will make twitter far more interesting once more.
You make a good point. There are many "thought leaders" who use Twitter to talk about things that few people have any interest in – e.g. whether they're going to Starbucks or what cute thing their child did at the park.
Good example for "best practices"…..on twitter…thank you for that comment
The problem is that Twitter's popularity is in spite of itself. The potential in Twiter gets more obvious the more you use it. For for those new to it, it's hard to make good use of; it's only once you find and follow the Twitter pros that you can see how it should be used, which is nothing like you are encouraged to use it when you first find the website.
If Twitter could organise itself better — or even organise the microcosm of third party apps which give it power — than many more people would get how its best used faster and a lot of the experimental stuff and useless rooky postings would disappear.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Twitter is the hot topic right now. Overnight it exploded into a social phenomenon, allowing people to send and receive messages in a real-time fashion and to a wide ranged audience. Our social media forum is constantly evolving and reinventing itself, so what exactly should we be expecting next? I suggest checking out how eZanga ( http://www.eZanga.com ), a search engine that specializes in pay per click advertising, has remodeled social networking with their recently launched site, http://www.HopOnThis.com. HopOnThis allows its member to win cash and prizes by social activity on the site. Could this be the next best thing to hit the social media circuit?
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