Monday, July 27, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Nothing to Twitter About
Earlier today I was cruising my favourite online paper, that leftist British stalwart, The Guardian. When I think of The Guardian I imagine a London pub filled brimming with aging intelligensia journalists, attired in tweed, complaining about Gordon Brown and reminiscing about the days before Thatcher (for whom not coincidentally this blog is named in tribute). It's a lovely, nostalgic image to imagine the place your news orginates and this consequently keeps me reading The Guardian.
All imaginings aside, this Guardian article caught my eye. The article is about Twitter, the microblogging site with which the faddish media are so infatuated. "Twitter not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15 year old expert," the headline declared.
Well, I could have told you that. Matthew Robson, the investment bank's 15 year old intern (can you say well connected? working at MS at 15!), shocked top analysts when he boldly declared what anyone under the age of 25 could have easily told you: Twitter is useless.
Shortly after reading the article, I learned that 60% of those who sign up for Twitter don't use the service after the first month. So while Twitter may have enormous growth rates this quarter, don't expect them to translate into real returns or high rates of user retention.
The largest problem with the service is the 140 character limit which makes it impossible to "tweet" anything intelligible. Even in this age of Adderall and sound bites, our attentions spans have not become quite so short as to remain attentive only to six words of information at a time (see public's infatuation with eloquency in the rise of Barack Obama).
The second problem is that due to the character limit "tweets" (how I hate that word!) are forced to become of only the most inane subject matter. Miley Cyrus recently made blogging headlines when she posted she was "eatin' an apple." The vast majority of human existence simply is not interesting enough to merit a description to be shared with your closest 300 followers to Twitter's ubiquitous question --"What are you doing?"
At an exclusive gathering in the ski resort town of Sun Valley, Utah earlier this week, media moguls like News Corp's Rupert Murdoch (though shouldn't he be dealing with the tabloid scandal back home??) quietly announced their concern about the difficulty in monetarizing a service like Twitter.
See this article from the Financial Times
So while all that twittering during the Iranian elections was very cool and 21st century, don't expect anyone whose other forms of communications are not banned by a repressive government to actually use the service. The fifteen year old got this one right: there's nothing to twitter about.
All imaginings aside, this Guardian article caught my eye. The article is about Twitter, the microblogging site with which the faddish media are so infatuated. "Twitter not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15 year old expert," the headline declared.
Well, I could have told you that. Matthew Robson, the investment bank's 15 year old intern (can you say well connected? working at MS at 15!), shocked top analysts when he boldly declared what anyone under the age of 25 could have easily told you: Twitter is useless.
Shortly after reading the article, I learned that 60% of those who sign up for Twitter don't use the service after the first month. So while Twitter may have enormous growth rates this quarter, don't expect them to translate into real returns or high rates of user retention.
The largest problem with the service is the 140 character limit which makes it impossible to "tweet" anything intelligible. Even in this age of Adderall and sound bites, our attentions spans have not become quite so short as to remain attentive only to six words of information at a time (see public's infatuation with eloquency in the rise of Barack Obama).
The second problem is that due to the character limit "tweets" (how I hate that word!) are forced to become of only the most inane subject matter. Miley Cyrus recently made blogging headlines when she posted she was "eatin' an apple." The vast majority of human existence simply is not interesting enough to merit a description to be shared with your closest 300 followers to Twitter's ubiquitous question --"What are you doing?"
At an exclusive gathering in the ski resort town of Sun Valley, Utah earlier this week, media moguls like News Corp's Rupert Murdoch (though shouldn't he be dealing with the tabloid scandal back home??) quietly announced their concern about the difficulty in monetarizing a service like Twitter.
See this article from the Financial Times
So while all that twittering during the Iranian elections was very cool and 21st century, don't expect anyone whose other forms of communications are not banned by a repressive government to actually use the service. The fifteen year old got this one right: there's nothing to twitter about.
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