Webupon

Judging from the response to my last submission – a review of a Twitter search engine, there might be some folks out there who are tired of hearing about Twitter. I can’t say I’m surprised at all, because, although I’ve kept this information close to the chest, I’m getting increasingly tired of hearing about it myself. In fact, I was stick of hearing about Twitter when Darren Rowse at Problogger couldn’t stop plugging the service after it came out.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Twitter is an excellent service. You send text messages, it posts them on the web, and everything mostly works. Great, that’s a bit innovative. But it’s not revolutionary in any way. We already keep in touch with people through sites like Facebook, we share links using Digg, and the early adopters among us are already staying up-to-date with RSS. So what’s the big deal?

I think it stems, like almost everything, from good marketing. Not only did Twitter do a great job of getting influential bloggers and other folks on the bandwagon from the start, but now companies only vaguely related to Twitter seem to be throwing it in as a buzzword, hoping they’ll appear trendy and cutting-edge. If a cell phone company wants to let you know that you’ll have fast access to Facebook, it seems they can’t let Twitter go unmentioned as well. But, in spite of all this buzz, I don’t actually know anyone in the real world who uses Twitter. In fact, the service seems to be the target of unprecedented scorn.

As nearly everyone I’ve spoken to about Twitter has pointed out, nobody cares whether you’re eating a sandwich or taking a dump. These are, in fact, the exact same comments we were hearing about run-of-the-mill bloggers three years ago, when blogging was the “next big thing”. Now the blog market is saturated, and Twitter offers the appearence of being something new and fresh.

Those “in the know” might point out that Tumblr has been providing a similar microblogging service since 2007, and, according to its Wikipedia article, users of Tumbler are more likely to stick with the service than Twitter users. Of course, even if the numbers given are accurate, it’s hard to tell why, but my personal inclination is that plenty of Twitter members are just “following the buzz”. Soon, they’ll get tired of Twitter, just like they got tired of spending hours on AIM or creating flashy MySpace pages. 

If you’ve read this far, you’ll be relieved to find that I’ve about ranted myself out on this particular topic. Probably you haven’t read this far. But, regardless, writing this felt good. The great people at Constant Content would never accept such an article. Lets hope I have better luck on Triond.