11:17PM
Twitter: the new SMS?
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
I still find Twitter quite an amazing experience. The idea that I can write a small SMS like message and have it view across the world by millions of people stunning.
Twitter has many pros and cons that makes it the platform that it is. It's difficult to follow conversations, fun to discover new people, worrying how often people seem willing to reveal very private information openly yet incredibly addictive to point of being an obsession.
So does it have a long term future?
If you parallel Twitter to Facebook as a comparison then some questions open up.
Facebook has been described many times as the telephone directory of the future. We will store contact details and messages for all of our key connections / friends / family and use that to continue to communicate. Facebook helps you find 'lost' friends from days gone by to rekindle friendships that you never would have been able to do BF (before Facebook).
So how does Twitter compare? The obvious one that jumps out is that Twitter is the SMS of the future. It works to the same 140 character limit but offers links, private message, open replies, searching... it's SMS on drugs!
But is it? You see for SMS all you need to know is your friends mobile number. Then you are in contact. On Twitter I need to find the user to chat to. And that's not always easy when the majority of users use obscure usernames.
There are more mobile users today not using mobile Twitter if not Twitter at all than are using it. So that means no tweets for them.
But we need to remember. Twitter was not designed to be a SMS service. It was designed for micro blogging. Small messages that if another user found interesting he / she cod post a small comment back.
More and more I now see Twitter replacing IM. Even replacing email. Neither are ideal or welcome. Make a comment. Yes. Have some replies. Yes. But take the ongoing conversation away to email or something else better suited.
Tweet spam? It's comming. Oh yes, it's comming.
Twitter has many pros and cons that makes it the platform that it is. It's difficult to follow conversations, fun to discover new people, worrying how often people seem willing to reveal very private information openly yet incredibly addictive to point of being an obsession.
So does it have a long term future?
If you parallel Twitter to Facebook as a comparison then some questions open up.
Facebook has been described many times as the telephone directory of the future. We will store contact details and messages for all of our key connections / friends / family and use that to continue to communicate. Facebook helps you find 'lost' friends from days gone by to rekindle friendships that you never would have been able to do BF (before Facebook).
So how does Twitter compare? The obvious one that jumps out is that Twitter is the SMS of the future. It works to the same 140 character limit but offers links, private message, open replies, searching... it's SMS on drugs!
But is it? You see for SMS all you need to know is your friends mobile number. Then you are in contact. On Twitter I need to find the user to chat to. And that's not always easy when the majority of users use obscure usernames.
There are more mobile users today not using mobile Twitter if not Twitter at all than are using it. So that means no tweets for them.
But we need to remember. Twitter was not designed to be a SMS service. It was designed for micro blogging. Small messages that if another user found interesting he / she cod post a small comment back.
More and more I now see Twitter replacing IM. Even replacing email. Neither are ideal or welcome. Make a comment. Yes. Have some replies. Yes. But take the ongoing conversation away to email or something else better suited.
Tweet spam? It's comming. Oh yes, it's comming.
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