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For normobs, Twitter simply isn’t on the radar — still

Published by Ewan on Sunday 20th July 2008, 00:08 | Filed under: Mobile

Steven Hodson over at Mashable is none too impressed at Twitter being spoken in the same breath as blogging. He’s pretty hard on those who view Twitter as a micro-blogging tool and ends with this rather direct summary:

Twitter is not blogging. It is not even micro-blogging. It is just another glorified messenger service with a fancy Fail Whale graphic for when it decides that it can’t even be a messenger service.

I’m not entirely comfortable with Twitter.

I get it. I get how it can be used. Same with Jaiku. I particularly liked Jaiku’s location-based status which is one of my favourite features of the service.

But as for life streaming, it’s a total arse.

Many of the feeds I see about the place are filled with, let’s be ultra honest here, total shite.

There is limited value in me knowing that you’re having a cup of coffee at the moment.

In fact, I’ll go you one step further. It’s of NO value to me knowing that you’re having a cup of coffee right now.

Not unless you give me some meta-data. Like your location. Now you’re talking. That’s potentially valuable to me. But only if I’m free to consider meeting you for a coffee.

Otherwise, getting a Tweet at 2am in the morning from you whilst you’re in NY and I’m in London… that doesn’t help at all.

So I find a heck of a lot of drivel on Twitter. Yet, now and again you get moments of pure genius. A comment that makes you think. A thought that gets your mind moving. It is, sadly, a rare happening. Valuable enough for me to put up with it.

There’s got to be something better, eh? Surely?

The reason I know there’s got to be something better is that none of my friends use it.

They’re all far too busy. I’m *too* busy. We’re doing a lot with our Push 1 For Help consultancy arm here at SMS Text News and, sadly, when I’m on-site, talking to people and giving them viewpoints, the last thing they want me to be doing is jumping up in the middle of a discussion and telling 250,000 readers that ‘I’m in a meeting’.

Further, they don’t want to waste the first 2 minutes of a meeting with me, waiting, whilst I update my statuses across the web to let people know I’m in a meeting.

None of my real friends use Twitter. I should quality ‘real’. I mean normobs. Normal mobile users who couldn’t give a stuff about it.

They’ll update their Facebook status, sometimes. They’ll upload photos daily. They’ll tag me in photos. This is NORMAL mobile users I’m talking about. Not geeks. But they get Facebook. They even get Facebook Mobile.

That’s saying something.

(The iPhone 2.0 normobs that I’ve come across are loving Facebook’s iPhone App, incidentally.)

But Twitter?

Take James for example. A highly qualified brain box IT consultant with a first generation iPhone. He likes arsing about with the phone’s gallery function. He uses a wide range of iPhone-designed mobile web pages — Google Reader, for example (where SMS Text News is a casual, once a fortnight dip — hi James) or Facebook Mobile.

James and I have known each other for more than a decade and he knows my mobile tendencies well. He’s got a mensa plaque on his wall at home celebrating his ability to work out the square root of 99 quicker than me.

And he hates Twitter with a passion. Primarily because I’ve tried to get him to use it. I’ve tried to get him and a few other friends using it and he’s not having it. He simply cannot see the point.

Now, here’s our problem.

Talk to mobile related geniuses around the planet and they’ll give you a different description of Twitter. Ask them why and they’ll give you a response that, when it boils down to it, means ‘er… because.’

Nothing works on James. No explanations. No Fortune Magazine articles, no Jeff Jarvis style explanations. He simply isn’t having it.

“Text me,” he tells me, “If you’ve got something to tell me. Text me.”

“Right, but I’d like to know what you’re doing,” I tell him, “You should do an update now and again.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Errrr,” I respond… scraping around for an answer that doesn’t begin, “Because, errr, it’s … it’ll… it’ll be cool.”

When your iPhone-toting normob doesn’t get Twitter and doesn’t care that they don’t get it, there’s a problem.

What does it mean for the future of Twitter?

I do wonder, I really do. Did you see they recently bought the Twitter search engine, Summize? This is, on the face of it, good news for the company and the burgeoning Twitter-industry of clients, and related services.

As for James and the rest of the Great Unwashed normobs? Have they just not seen the light, yet?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 12:08 am and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • The thing about Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk and all the other emerging social platforms is that social media geeks like me will jump on them straight away. We don't care that there's no-one we know on there, it's fun meeting new people. The trouble is, the only people you meet on there are other social media geeks so it just becomes one big circlejerk that's totally unappealing to 'normobs'. How do we break the circle? I don't know. I wrote a blog post about it here: http://14sandwiches.com/2008/07/02/increasing-f...

    The thing is, Twitter has soooo much potential. There's a location aware Twitter client for the iPhone called Twinkle. You can see what other Twinkle users are Tweeting close to you. You can narrow it down to as close as one mile from you. In certain situations (music festivals, major crises etc) this could be really really useful.
  • Can I Twitter this? Seriously...
  • As usual I completely disagree with Stephen Hodson over at Mashable. I recommend watching this video: Twitter in Plain English
  • Colin_M
    Ewan, Ewan, Ewan... why is it whenever I check in here, I find something that brings out the worst in my nature? Last week, iPhones. This week, Twitter.

    I don't use Twitter, I should point out. Never have. I know what it is though, and know what it does, and that was enough for me. I also know a few people who use it (and as you'd be unsurprised to learn, they're ubergeeks). I don't hate Twitter, I should also emphasise. In fact, it's an application that has a lot of potential - well, if it ever achieved some semblance of stability under pressure, that is. You and MartinSFP have already pointed out some of the benefits it could have combined with localisation services.

    But, as with so many Web 2.0 tools, their potential has been lost in a sea of overwhelming noise. We're getting too much information, from too many sources, and truth is, we need to all cut back on it. We keep whining about how overloaded we all are with information, problem is... a lot of it we bring on ourselves by inviting it in for tea.

    Straight-up question Ewan, to echo what your friend James said - why do you NEED Twitter?

    Well... I'm waiting.

    Still...?

    OK, truth is, you don't. You just think you do. You've been conditioned to think like that, because you work in the tech industry, where everything new has a buzz about it. I'll bet you work horrendously long hours too (because anyone involved in tech, especially start-ups, does) and when you spend that much time in a certain environment, you begin to mistake "the bubble" as being representative of the world as a whole. Hence your surprise that Normob users couldn't give a tweet (couldn't resist!) about Twitter. They don't care because... (gasp)... it's actually not that special to them. It fills a need they don't actually recognise as a need in the first place, and they know it. At least in how it's currently being used. The thing with normob users is that until you can show them something in a product that will actually positively impact them - they'll be suspicious of it at best, and just not care at all at worst.

    Will Twitter survive? Unless it is put to uses beyond what it currently amounts to (electronic confetti), it will survive in the tech community as a geekerati-favourite for a while. Until something else comes along that aces it, which'll probably be a year at most. But growth into the promised land of widespread normob user adoption? Don't hold your breath. It's already struggling with scalability for one thing, and even if that's solved, for it to become a universal service will require the type of funding that will only come with some way of monetizing the service.

    Ahh yes, the secret weakness of every Web 2.0 app, that someone, ultimately, has to pay the bills, and the Venture Capital won't keep coming forever. One day, you have to pay your own bills, or get your customers to pay them for you. Oh, just sell advertising and turn into the new Google? Yuh. It's that easy. That's why everyone turns into Google.
  • True story:

    Last April I was invited along to a party via a friend who I half knew but who I had a good feeling about. By going to this party I met and made a whole bunch of new friends... We all got on so well but strangely enough we never ended up talking about work. It was a welcome, refreshing break and I remember once, about six months after meeting them all, we were all out having a picnic somewhere when suddenly about four or five phones went off at once in the group...

    No one moved.

    I smiled, happy to think that this lot weren't the kind of folk that would let their mobiles interrupt a lovely picnic... but then I thought a bit more.. so I tried the ol'...

    "Your phone went off mate..."

    "Cheers James, it's alright - it's just this thing we all use called Twitter. That's probably Charlie telling us she's on her way... You should try it y'know, it's great. It's how we all stay in touch with each other..."

    I nearly exploded in shock...

    ...there are people out there using it for other things than just social/mobile/echo chamber gubbins... You just never hear of them because they don't move in this space.
  • Colin_M
    That's a good example of how Twitter CAN be constructively used - a communicator for a small group of people. I think the real trick with it is you have to be self-disciplined and subscribe to the feeds that are actually important to you, the ones you actually might need to get an update on in real time. What Twitter does provide is an effective "One to Many" medium. OK, "Charlie" could have just sent a multirecipient text, but then she's paying for each of the recipients - good way to gobble up your monthly allowance, that is...

    The issue arises when you lose that self-discipline and start subscribing to anything/anyone you might only be vaguely interested in. Then you get deafening levels of noise, and you lose the needles in the haystack. Look at Robert Scoble - I read a thing a while back where he claimed he follows some absurd number of Twitterers, thousands basically. I remember doing the arithmetic on it and it worked out he'd be receiving a tweet, 24/7, once every 12 seconds. That's just showing off, and of no practical usage. To actually read every one of those would be impossible, but there's no effective autofilter in place.

    Simple solution - subscribe to what you NEED, the rest can wait.
  • Its really simple; twitter users are of a particular type of personality type and character type. The world is not made only of these people and therefore services that cater to just those types have to have another reason for being needed besides "its just the thing to do."

    Unlike many who "live" on the web; I don't subscribe to every new service out there. I analyize my needs and then use what works best. Sometimes its only something used for a moment (Evernote and Remember the Milk), other times it has value beyond the inital interest and so it stick around (mobile email, Jaiku). To gravatate to everything new is a signifiant sign of unrestlessness, and usually means that the person is looking to be fulfilled by something or trying yet to find out who they are. When you find out who you are, following the latest thing is less of a concern to just living.
  • nacho
    I got an email from twitter saying that they're shutting down their SMS update service in the UK. It has something to do with UK operators charges to twitter. So a new and exciting service have been shut down even before it gets to the mainstream. Thank you very much O2, voda, orange, t-mob et al!!!!
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