Is Twitter in danger of becoming the next MySpace?
By Dave Jeyes
Twitter has been undergoing a dramatic growth phase marked by service instability and people diving into the new medium to interact directly with their favorite bands brands. While the microblogging service has garnered a huge following in the past few years, the next couple of months will define whether Twitter can go mainstream and still remain relevant.
In February alone over 10 million users visited the site to share the minutiae of their daily lives and follow their favorite celebrities. The service has doubled in size in the past two months alone and 700 percent year over year.
Twitter has never been a particularly stable service and still has serious underlying architectural issues. While some people may think the recent problems are due to Twitter moving some parts of the service to Amazon’s S3 cloud computing servers, it’s really the same old problems cropping up over and over.
These problems are fairly trivial compared to the impact that an onslaught of new users can have on the culture and feel of a social media site such as Twitter. How Twitter manages its community will be of the utmost importance if it is to survive becoming a cultural phenomenon.
One potential problem with a service loaded with so many people is that it has a tendency to become cluttered. Twitter tried to head off this issue by providing basic themes, but sites like Twitter Gallery and TwitBacks have still cropped up a la MySpace.
The more dangerous issue facing the Twitter community is the level of noise in the service versus actual people. As brands rush onto Twitter and start following users, they set off a firestorm of emails to users that inevitably clog up their inboxes.
As of yet, there are no signs that Twitter intends to contain these invites to a request page on the Web. Even so, the requests are likely to reach a similar tempo to the friend requests from bands and aspiring models on MySpace in the past few years.
How Twitter decides to address these kinds of social problems and all the unforeseen ways that users can find to use and abuse the service, will determine whether it remains relevant beyond the end of this year. Unless, of course, the company gets acquired and then all bets are off.
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Stumble It!
April 9th, 2009
Twitter is a fad. Most of the tweets these days seem to be people trying to get rich quick schemes, or “How to get a million followers in a five minutes”, or celebrity assistants posing as celebrities. Twitter’s fifteen minutes of fame is almost up.