DISQUS

dccrowley · 1 year ago

When twitter goes mainstream it will be awesome. I live in a village, work in nearest town. I can see great uses for it among me and my fellow villagers. I might use 2 accounts and clients to keep the geeks and farmers apart!

mathewi · 1 year ago

Good one, Don :-)

duarte · 1 year ago

I think that's an accurate assessment. Most of my friends have asked me in person or online about Twitter after seeing my Facebook status as: Duarte is twittering: <fill in the blank>. The first question usually is "What is this twittering thing?" Some get it; most do not.

p.s. I too am old enought o have been a heavy ICQ user.

Mark Dykeman · 1 year ago

Your comments about the lack of a Twitter business model in a recent post made me think a bit about how it could work. One of the things that I thought of was the ability to remove the 140 chr. limit for a paid account, although I have no idea how Twitter would be able to do that without massive reengineering. To me, that and reliability are the only major barriers to Twitter becoming a more broadly accepted group chat medium. At the same time, if you have to pay for it... might not be so attractive.

leigh · 1 year ago

I think adoption cycles have become so short and the lifespan of cool even shorter, that the expectation is that the network will accept or reject in 18m or less.

I guess since they are 2 years old the assumption is they should have crossed the chasm by now?

therealmccrea · 1 year ago

Great post. I think the comparison to early days of IM is apt.

mathewi · 1 year ago

Thanks, John.

Matthew Gallant · 1 year ago

I've had the exact same reaction among non-geek friends, one of them even interpreted what I said as the actual verb "twitter."

Thusenth · 1 year ago

Twitter is a very lonely app when you're the only one on it. There's only so many tweets you can do before it hits you that no one is reading them.

If a person tweets in the cloud and there is nobody following, is there a reason to tweet?

Timothy McDoniel · 1 year ago

My friends and family aren't on Twitter and they don't really 'get' it. But that's okay. The only way Twitter won't be so lonely is to just follow people that share your interests. Alot of them will return the 'follow' and you'll get to engage with some pretty interesting people. Some will just send neat links, some will make you laugh, I've even got alot of beta invites just by asking someone who started talking about it. For Twitter not to be lonely, you shouldn't depend on friends and family to make it worthwhile. Send tweets about what's going on, things you find interesting, etc. Soon you'll have people following you to hear what you've got to say. I do have a number of family and friends on Facebook, so I just installed an app their, that feeds my tweets into it. :-)

mathewi · 1 year ago

Excellent advice, Timothy.

Daniel Gibbons · 1 year ago

I think the difference is that Twitter really doesn't have mainstream utility. For example, when Michael Arrington talks about it being a critical source of breaking news, he's generally referring to news literally no-one outside of the tech. blogosphere remotely cares about.

IM applications such as ICQ allowed people to communicate more rapidly and efficiently, so while like most new technology their roots were in the early adopter crowd, they contained a killer feature ordinary people could relate to.

I found MG Siegler's analysis that it's all about investing the time to follow and be followed to be indicative of how the insular tech world just doesn't understand normal people. You know, people who don't have the luxury of whiling away a few hours to force themselves into unnatural social behaviours so they can enjoy Twitter's benefits.

Don't get me wrong, I actually do like Twitter, but I couldn't do my job without IM. And I agree with Leigh, above, that Twitter's probably had enough time to demonstrate mainstream appeal and utility.

whydowork · 1 year ago

I side with bluelines on this one.

IM is easy for the non-tech guru to understand and use. Your friend has an IM account, you have an IM account and you have an instant communication channel to communicate.

Twittering into 'the cloud' and getting feedback works for those who understand what the cloud is, which are the same crowd that love the idea of cloud computing. :)

There is mass appeal within the nerd community which is why the apps are being pumped out so quickly, but I doubt my mom (who does use msn messenger) will be joining anytime soon.

Leigh · 1 year ago

And I would say even worse, kids think Twitter is the older persons communication method.....that to me creates huge limitations for it going into the future.

mathewi · 1 year ago

That's why I think Twitter needs to be part of something larger --
something that offers traditional IM-type features, text messaging to
mobiles, Facebook status updates, etc. It's dumb to have to use three
separate tools to do all of that. It's like having to use a separate
phone for long-distance calls.