The One Reason Twitter Will Fail
There is no question that Twitter was the darling of 2009. Whole vocabularies that could fill a Twebster Dictionary were built up as people slathered and frothed their way to a social media hyper-frenzy.
I have a personal index for determining how big a technology is. I call it the “Mom-Crossover Effect”. It derives from Bill Simmon‘s similar use for sports stories. Basically, if my mom asks me about a technology, I know that is way-past early adopter stage and is right at the top or just past the peak of the customer acquisition bell curve. For Bill Simmon’s Mom, last year’s cross-over was Tiger’s infidelities, that was enough to catch her attention. For my mom, 2009-10 was the year of Twitter. When my mom asked me how Twitter works, I know something is big. (For a reference point, we had a conversation earlier this year about the iPad, although iPhone 4 drew a blank…)
While Twitter is still a site du jour, they face some serious issues going forward. Sure there are some scaling issues as the “Fail Whale” still appears a little too often. But the one thing that is going to leave Twitter on top of the dot.bomb scrap heap currently populated by altavista, excite and myspace is pure and simple data quality.
I am sure each of you has experienced this in your forages in the Twitter Twighlight… Life coaches selling webinars, elixirs that will grow various body parts and when did we get offers for 10 business gurus each?
One of the biggest complaints I run into with Twitter users is all the “crap” that is polluting their feed. This is certainly an issue that Twitter is aware of and working on. But even if Twitter does manage to completely eliminate spammy and automated tweets, there is still a torrent of drivel that fuels the Twuniverse from regular folks who want to share their eating habits, sleep patterns or office nuisances. And that torrent is growing.
In June, TechCrunch wrote about how Twitter has 190 million users and 65 million daily tweets. 65 million a day is a big number. 65 million is a number that many start-ups would kill to have. But ask yourself this question:
Would you rather have 65 million McDonald’s hamburgers or 1 Kobe Steak?
I worked at start-ups in New Zealand and Canada where data quality became an issue that caused one start-up to fold and leaves another on life support. I know from working with the leadership teams at both of those start-ups that if they had an opportunity to do it over, they would have be rigorous in their data-quality decisions early on. A little early pain is worth avoiding the drastic repercussions down the road that poor data can cause. Which leads us to:
Can you name one successful internet company with poor data?
I am going to guess that you struggled to come up with something here. Google? Nope, legendary data. Facebook? Its mostly user generated, but quality. I can to the conclusion that poor data and being successful are mutually exclusive events in the Internet space. Except for Twitter. Twitter has so far maintained a growth rate that ensures new users more than make up for those failing off with the poor data. But, how long can Twitter maintain this growth rate? There is only so much fresh meat out there, this begs the question:
Is Twitter a Zombie? The living dead that is perpetually one sunrise from destruction?
Late in 2009, Google, Microsoft and Facebook jockeyed for position to acquire all or part of Twitter or Twitter’s data. There was constant speculation on what the final valuation would be and who would win the real-time search war. Finally a deal was struck and 2010 saw tweets appearing on the first page of Google search results.
Except, Google is the master of Data-driven decision making. If Google users did not find value in having Tweets in search results, they would disappear. 6 months later, the only searches that show Tweets are the super-top-notch trending topics. Google users have voted against Twitter with their clicks. Ouch! This raises yet another important question:
If you and I don’t find Tweets to be useful information, what benefit does Twitter add?
But enough from me! What do you think? Is the writing on the wall for Twitter? Or will a clean-up of the data save the day? Or maybe Twitter is fine just the way it is! Let me know in the comments below!
The way I see it is, that not all 65 million tweets are Big Macs as you state, some of them are pure gold for a period of time, specifically real time events. Imagine how huge would have twitter been if we would have had it on 9/11. How important is Twitter to communicate things that have gone airy in the planet (Earthquackes, etc). Each of those tweets stating information about something really important that is happening right now is a kobe steak even if it is just for a short period of time.
Thats a good way of looking at it.
But they still have issues as to getting the right information to the right people. Too much noise for me… not enough signal.
But what the hell do I know? I had a Big Mac last night and it tasted awesome.
:)
I disagree. While I experienced some noise issues initially, it has been way down in the past year and a half. Spammers seem to go away quickly or are non-existent. Perhaps its how choosey I am with my followers? If someone follows me, I don’t automatically follow, I read through their tweets for a glimpse of their signal-to-noise ration. I probably follow 1 out of every 10 that follow me. Most of my followers are local or at a minimum in my industry or interest groups. I go through my follow list once or twice a year and delete a bunch “it’s not you, it me” I say)
And if anything, the noise ratio has been getting better, not worse.
But this is just my experience.
I totally agree things have been getting better at Twitter.
And if you take a look at Bing Social there are other people out there trying to make sense of Twitter’s immense data. The improvement has even been noticeable since I wrote the post 3 months ago.
That being said, isn’t the management of your Twitter account (choosing who to follow and periodic culling) a bit tiresome? It will be interesting to see what the signal to noise ratio looks like a year from now.
Great Comment!
I agree with Roman, but I also agree with you, Jesse. But then again, I think that Facebook is going to be replaced by something more innovative, something that isn’t now filled with a stream of game invites.
Going back to Twitter and Roman’s point… well, when you’re at some TED event, and half the room is tweeting what they’re hearing… is that really a productive use of the tweeter’s time? Would I not rather be enjoying my vacation, instead of taking pictures and video of everything and missing the vacation itself?
Jesse, what you speak of in your article is precisely the reason that although the web is chock-full of information, we haven’t seen the death of news organizations, magazines, TV, or movies. We will always need professionals to sort through the noise and give us concise, relevant information, and present it in the proper format.
Ummm… in the end… all these social networks will be super-ceded by something that is not exclusive in membership.