As I trawled through the weekend newspapers in the search for anything other than recession doom and gloom, the debate on bankers’ bonuses or frivolous Valentines reunion stories, it became evident that in almost every newspaper or publication I read, there was at least one story on Twitter. Intrigued by the apparent fascination this weekend about the service, I couldn’t help but obsess over wanting to read more to find out whether I was missing something.
I was stunned to read in the FT that Twitter rejected a takeover by Facebook valued at up to $500m, even though there is no revenue generation model from the service… Now correct me if I am wrong, but it seems almost obscene to place so much value on something that has failed to introduce ways to make money from it yet.
I then went on to discover The Twitterati (OMG – there’s a name for so-called elite users) column in the Sunday Times Style magazine. I was horrified to read that someone had actually broadcast the birth of a child to the whole world using Twitter!
And then came the endorsement from India Knight (Sunday Times columnist) that she is retracting her initial thoughts about the service – “saying it was needy and megalomaniacal and plain weird for any sane person to spend the day posting random thoughts onto a public site”, to now class it as “amazing”. Amazing because of 3 things -
1. finding out people are funny
2. apparently it can be a great resource and
3. you feel connected
Embarrassed by the fact that I work in a Digital Agency and I had not experienced the Twitter phenomenon (and also having soaked up all this recent information), I immediately signed up to Twitter and selected a few friends to follow. Having broadcast my first thought “Crofty00 just sold her soul to the devil and signed up to Twitter” it was swiftly responded to by my ex-housemate – “you’ll be bored of it in 10 mins! :)”. How right he was… has the world slowly become obsessed with what everyone else is doing every moment of the day? At what point will we make the realisation that focusing on our own lives may provide a real benefit, rather than preoccupying our interest with others?
I don’t really see any personal benefit in Twitter, I don’t want to know when my mate “is listening to the weird bubbly sound of earwax dissolving inside his ear” or “totally lost for words and feels drained”. Can that sort of thing not be discussed in the pub, or are we now evolving into a world where the majority of our social communication is done solely through the realms of the virtual world…. known as Twitter. And will there be any real financial benefits in the future?
A revenue model may be on it’s way:
http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/879748/Twitter-begin-charging-brands-commercial-use/
Haha well don’t follow me then! Someone advised me not to post that, but they were speaking into my left ear and I couldn’t hear them. ;) And I didn’t post both those things, just to clear that ambiguity up.
As for its money making potential, who knows? That’s not a defeatist answer, no-one seems to thus far. Perhaps the biggest lesson to learn from Twitter is that ’simple’ can still cut it out there amongst the increasing noise of Facebook and social networking in general.
Well if I may, and you did say to correct you if you were wrong, the Facebook takeover bid was actually based on share options as opposed to real money (even Facebook doesn’t have those sort of readies at hand), and as everyone knows, shares can end up counting for nothing, so that’s very different.
As for your views on Twitter, I find it a shame that you would write it off so quickly and not experience it fully to decipher it’s benefits. You don’t like hearing about your friends ear problem? It’s simple, don’t follow the guy (but in the words of The Joker, “Why so serious?” – Can you honestly say it ruined your day?). Instead, find people in the industry you work in and follow them, it’s amazing what great little snippets of insight you can gain over even one 24hr period. Need help with something? Beg the question and a lot of the time you’ll have a number of answers and solutions within seconds.
And your comment on financial benefits…Do you not think it commendable that Twitter haven’t gone down the route of Facebook and stuck a bunch of banner ads all over their site? It’s something they could easily do at any point. Well done them I say. Instead, they are taking time to come up with creative ways to introduce a finance model of some sort. It’s been reported even over the last couple of weeks that they may look to charge corporations to use it as a communication channel. If they nail it, and Twitter keeps growing in popularity as rapidly as it has even in 2009, all their concerns about money will be solved overnight. So Kudos to Twitter for taking the harder but more commendable route to finding a solution. I’m confident it will happen for them.
I’ll leave you with this. US President and Statesmen Rutherford B Hayes once said of the telephone, “An amazing invention – but who would ever want to use one?”. Epic fail, don’t you think?