I signed up for Twitter yesterday. KSCU created an account and sent me a message on Facebook (think about that for a minute) to let me know, so I figured I would sign up too, finally. (You don’t need an account to follow someone on Twitter, but I am always looking for an excuse to do something I don’t want to do that I likely should, especially if it is for my career.)
Twitter works for different reasons than Facebook or the other social networks (Merchant Circle, LinkedIn etc.). I don’t understand why people haven’t figured this out, considering that we love, as a society, to be so judgmental. Twitter works because it places the focus squarely on the tweeter and leaves it there.
Facebook has two or three years left in it. It has a major flaw. When people judge you, they can judge you in person. Every post on Facebook lets others comment right below it, for all to see. This is its strongest selling point and a key reason for its success. (Granted, you used to not be able to comment on everything, but the latest, er, facelift to the site now enables this.) But there is a problem with this: People are ridiculously sensitive, especially on the Internet, the most insensitive place in the world.
Enter Twitter. Twitter lets you say whatever you want, but nobody is ever going to see it, and therefore no one is ever going to judge you. Do you really think people give their opinion because others will care? Of course not. People are merely interested in hearing/reading themselves. It’s no different than taking a dump and admiring your handiwork before flushing it away. “Twitter” does rhyme with “shitter,” after all.
All of this assumes default settings, of course. If I don’t want to hear the status of someone who is a mutual friend at best — you know, the ones you add because your friends add them, and you don’t want to deal with the politics of Facebook friends — I can turn down their posts in my settings so they show up less often, or even not at all. But who does that? The most important aspect of any user interface design is the popularity of the default settings, because 95% of people are going to use them. Homer Simpson was right.
The default settings on Twitter are pretty straightforward. You sign up, decide to add people, which is easy because it can search your e-mail address book, and you’re done.
So now what?
Well, you can either log on to the site to read everyone’s tweets or you can have them sent to your phone. Because of the stereotypes of people tweeting everything they do, I feel as if I could rent my phone to a woman whose sex toy had run out of batteries. I hate the phone. Facebook updates are OK, because I can control that easily. (Again, fear of the unknown is why people don’t want to manually control these things. I got over it for Facebook, but most users will not.)
Having people sign up on your Web site, only to have them never return is why a lot of sites fail. I have no desire to go back to Twitter. I already went there. I’ll come back later, but as Bil Keane pointed out, later may never happen.
Perhaps there is a way to get daily updates of everyone’s tweets in a single e-mail, but I doubt it. I mean, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? The purpose of Twitter is that it is live and in your face. It’s what you’re doing right now. Who cares about what you did yesterday? Case in point: the lousy numbers I get on YouTube. People treat it like it’s yesterday’s news.
However, it’s not all bad news. The path to Twitter’s success does not lead to everyone being engaged in what everyone else is doing. That’s Facebook’s job. And it works, incidentally, on Facebook because you get inspiration to write. Whether it’s 25 things about you or a bucket list, there is always something to write a note about, and then there’s the commenting. Commenting on Facebook makes sense because everyone is looking. “Hey, look at me!” you shout. Facebook is a destination. Twitter is an unlocked diary that no one reads. It lets people write blog posts that can’t be longer than 100-odd characters. Who needs inspiration?
Gary Radnich doesn’t realize it, but he has summed up what no one will admit about the content on Twitter: Nobody cares!
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