Twitter Transition

Instead of another extensive reading list, this Saturday I offer a brief essay giving a different kind of perspective on Twitter.  Personally, I've been tweeting for several years now and though I find it to be a fun exercise to compress a meaningful communication into the 140 characters (including spaces), it's really for me been much more of a novelty than a useful tool.  When I first started, I attended a seminar in which the Twitter gospel was being preached, and much like the Internet gospel of the late 1990s where everyone had to be in on it or lose out (despite the fact that no one was yet making money at it), the message being preached was any business had to have a consistent Twitter presence to be successful.  Such a presence was defined at the time as a minimum of five tweets per day.  I had my doubts even then about why any enterprise would devote the manpower to such an effort, let alone why anyone would devote energy to reading all that.  Since then my doubts have been confirmed.  I have never found a company that does anywhere near five tweets per day, or even for that matter five per month, and yet they seem to be doing very well despite that.  So I found this essay to be kind of refreshing with its prediction that Twitter is just another passing fad, a prediction part of me hopes turns out to be true.

Twitter Transition

by Bob Lefsetz - June 20th, 2015, 3:00pm

Maybe Twitter’s unfixable.

Maybe it’s a fad like MySpace. Something gee-whiz, brand new, that is succeeded by a platform with more functionality.

Twitter told us we want instant news.

But it never turned into a comprehensible service.

It’s the internet at its worst. A small enterprise where you communicate amongst your circle, with a bit of access to the famous, which morphs into a tsunami of hype that we ultimately ignore.

Twitter is a great place to find out what’s happening right now. To read press releases. But it does a bad job of making the results comprehensible to the masses. It’s Alta Vista, and we’re waiting for Google.

If you think Jack Dorsey can save it, you’re unaware of Square. Another product that got left in the dust. Dorsey didn’t realize that starting is only the beginning. That to win you’ve got to deal with or supersede the entrenched elements, like the banks. Square was the small new thing that turned into the small old thing. And in today’s world that’s death. Furthermore, Dorsey’s image has been shattered by the naysayers. He seems to take too much credit, and based on Square’s results the rumors seem true.

So what to do?

Credit Chris Sacca for criticizing the company. This is something we rarely see at established businesses, a ground floor investor questioning management and direction. Everybody at the old company drinks the kool-aid, lines up behind the boss and marches towards the cliff. And then they’re surprised when someone steals their cheese, like in the music business.

Twitter is a feature, not a standalone service. Snapchat moves into entertainment and Twitter can’t even make its existing service usable. Twitter should be part of a search engine. Or should include other features. Maybe it’s less about having everybody tweet than categorizing info to make it accessible. We don’t care what the nobody has to say, and right now it’s only the vocal nobodies tweeting away. Along with the brands, both corporations and people, who want to keep us informed of their efforts and whereabouts. But this self-promotion seems phony and ultimately rings hollow.

So what we’ve learned once again is the internet eats companies. What is on everybody’s lips, clicked on today, is left on the scrapheap tomorrow. Remember when we all live-tweeted TV shows? That’s akin to remembering the Macarena, or the Hula Hoop. It’s already nostalgia.

But how come every fad is seen as lasting?

Maybe it’s our short term economy.

Maybe it’s media that needs something to trumpet.

The failure is certainly not the public. The public leads on the internet. And the public kicked the tires on Twitter and then abandoned it. Leaving it to those addicted to testify just like they did about Google Glass and now the Apple Watch. The sideshow becomes the main show, but only for a little while.

We want information.

We want to connect.

Twitter was a start.

It certainly won’t be the end.