Flamboyance of Twitter Story – and The Risk [Hype/Hoopla]
Think of the Twitter Trajectory in last three years. Brilliant media coverage, high class funding (just look at the kind of money that is involved: USD 155 Million, in series A, B, C and D excluding the out-of-pocket investment of the co-founding team), excellent traction amongst users across the world and a superb ecosystem for third party applications too.
None making any money.
Even though the search alliances (does it not mean subservience to Google, Yahoo & Bing?) are in place, and media still continues to go ga-ga alongside the powerful news trend feature and several other opportunities that Twitter offers to both businesses and individuals, IMHO there is little value in long term that Twitter can charge its clientèle for.
Besides, it’s not about the revenue model alone (which is a bit validated for Twitter & clones already). The Twitter game fails to orchestrate into a long term value based business ecosystem where the in-coming equations are well balanced with the out-going ones. There doesn’t seem to be enough utility on offer (as of now) to hold the capers against the ever changing needs (say for a term period of one decade) of the fickle-minded move-on-to-something-else type of human beings.
Twitter's Valley of Death
So, will Twitter and the investors behind it, sail across the valley of death? The answer is ‘out there’, as I wish to hide my skepticism. One more market correction and the thin balance might just break apart showing the gap in investment psychology and sense. A simple litmus test of human psychology proves it all. Aren’t we wanderers, who’d keep updating our database of perception about companies, people and applications from Awesome to Ordinary every few months? Emails no longer appeal as much as chat tools as much as social networks as much as Twitter as much as something else in future!
Even the best of long-term engagement tools like Facebook (exception), MySpace & Orkut find it difficult to leverage growth where at least the value offered by the applications clearly have an edge over the Twitter’s current offerings. In fact Twitter does not even build a relationship with a general user. It only tells about what the world is talking about at present, and sometimes none of the top trends seem noteworthy. Only the one-on-one connection that allows ‘following your favorite brand’ and the ‘brand following you back’ (depending on education & pro-activeness of the brand i.e. Filmstars & Politicians etc.) seems a valuable incentive.
According to me, Twitter is yet not a pain-killer for an ordinary user. It would not retain the interest (return-ability) of users over a prolonged period of time. In fact the hazards of clicking into littered viruses & dangerous NSFW stuff across the internet is also very high (A spammer’s paradise).
Twitter should strive to become a concrete offering to virtually tide over the looming up-climb of the Death Valley; which is already quite deep for them. Such as they could turn into a ‘people search engine’ of the future, or mass communication tool for brands or something else. As of now, if I were to catch up with really important news or updates I would still turn to standard blogs, FB, Orkut or MySpace.
So does all the hype and trending around Twitter really mean a good investment by the Valley? No matter how simplistic the application is today, it seems to be an uphill task for them ahead. And one cannot ignore the possibility of yet another market correction where hype & hoopla is replaced by ugly realities.
What’s your take?
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I am Tech Blogger for Asia and owner of BubbleIdeas.
That’s a bold article, Arvind! Nice work.
I agree to the point that it is not a pain killer and almost everyone (active users)out there is marketing himself.
But the sheer size of it has made it a BIG tool… to get instant attention/help from anyone.
On many sites typically only 10% of the audience contributes to the content,the rest of it just consumes it..Take youtube,flickr for example.On twitter I think the efforts of the interested few can still provide value to the rest of the world. I would not have said this with confidence before the search deals because twitter was then an ecosystem of its own.You had to get into it or use the 3rd party apps in order to reap its benefits i,e read the news or updates from people you follow.
Not anymore. Twitter search results will show real time news for people who have not ever visited twitter but just saw those links via Google/Bing.Your argument does hold true if you consider twitter as just a social network, but it is now more than that and I think the search deal will unlock a lot of value even after mainstream interest dies down.
Well twitter seems to be pretty effective in information distribution. So it could be a good distribution channel and corporates can pay to distribute the content. Like accounts could be charged for being verified and this could be an annual charge.
As an example, I follow (nothing but subscribe to) timeoutblr which gives me information but also puts in advertizements about their latest issues. I would be willing to follow bmw if I have a BMW car and want to know about their new service stations, recalls etc, making it a very effective channel to reach out to the customers. Like mailing list but a little different since here there is no spam an only the company can talk to you but others cannot talk to you unless you really want.
Could facebook enable the same functionality. Sure it can, “Become a Fan” is pretty close to that.
U mean the use case of twitter? Yes, but then that is too narrow to meet the demand against $155m, isn’t it?
I could never understand the hype about twitter. It is just me-too fad and will soon gonna die. If you follow 1-10 peoples, it is easy to keep track of things but once you start following more people, it just becomes useless pile of messages.
That’s why a “list” feature was introduced last week. You could ‘list’ people and not follow them. That way, their tweets would not appear in your tweetline. But you could easily read their tweets by going to the relevant list that you created.
I already have a list named “spammers”, and the only person in the list is Guy Kawasaki.
I will add him to ‘Spammers.AllTop’ list
hmmm lol
Twitter should not be considered as a business only. Twitter is an invention like email – a new communication protocol. They’ve invented a new way of communicating – 140 chars or less and real-time updates. It is a source of information not available otherwise, like trends, that’s why Google and Bing tied up with Twitter. Email as a profitable business was once a big question mark, maybe it still is, and likewise Twitter will take time to figure a way to monetize tweets. But let’s not view Twitter as a regular startup – its something more.
I kind of disagree a little bit here. I find more value in a service like twitter than FB anyday. In the long run, they would add more value to the entire ecosytem than these social networks.
Even from monetization stand point, they stand better chances as it’s proven that corporates already use it very effectively.
U mean twitter has greater leverage to monetize just because corporates r using it??? Can u explain how??
FB is cash positive already and so for a reason. So no point comparing it with revenue case of twitter.
cheers,
arvind
While you make some valid points, the fundamental question to isnt clear to me – Are you picking bones against twitter as the microblogging platform or Microblogging as a whole? I am assuming the latter based on the tone of the article.
If the issue is against twitter then the case is pretty clear. The web is successful because its decentralized and at some point in the next 6 months if twitter doesnt address this, other solutions are going to appear (statusnet/omb).
But if you are argument is against microblogging as a whole, I would beg to disagree. It might seem as though there isnt an apparent value in it to the end user. Things along similar lines were said about blogging in 2002. What drives the a-listers(who end up popularizing the platform) is the quality of conversation. Be it blogging, facebook, or twitter.
Usage patterns for new platforms take time, and when they arrive so do the marketers. The answer lies in the execution. How do u still maintain quality of conversation while expanding.
At moment, tools are being built to harness the value of twitter, be it through media companies or search companies. It is in these tools that the end user will find value. There in lies the success of twitter.
Not everyone has the time to read and even few people have time to write a long comment such as this but a boatload of them have something to say in less than 140 characters. Yes they will move onto something better/smarter in a few year but such is the evolution of the web. Doesnt mean there isnt value.
People still chat on instant messaging. They just dont chat on it all the time! Microblogging has its place in the ecosystem.
Issue is not microblogging as whole, but only that of twitter’s uplclimb unless the money invested was for philanthropic reasons (I read someone saying, twitter should not be seen as a business).
I enjoyed reading the thoughts expressed in the post and the comments. It is pretty obvious that opinion about the value of Twitter is still quite sharply polarized. Some think that Twitter and other such services are just a fad, the content on them is mostly useless. Others swear by them. One contribution I want to make to settle this debate is to point everyone to TipTop, the only real-time, semantic, social search engine at http://FeelTipTop.com If after you do a couple of searches on this engine, you remain unconvinced about the value of Twitter, I would be both very surprised and disappointed.