Mon, 19 Mar 2007
Mat Balez predicts
the demise of Twitter. Twitter is
kind of a micro-blogging tool. You can post messages to Twitter over the web,
IM, and SMS. These messages are then sent to people in your social network,
again through IM, SMS, or the web (html or rss). The messages are limited to
140 characters, and are meant to keep your friends up to date about the
minutiae in your life.
Twitter has become quite popular, but Mat thinks it will fail pretty quickly because it offers no real value beyond the novelty and is too much work. I think the real reason Twitter is likely to fail is that it suffers from network effects that bend back on themselves. Like other networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn, the service becomes more useful as more people use it. But with Twitter, beyond a certain level, it becomes too intrusive and therefore less useful. If you have a hundred friends posting every time they refill their coffee cup, you will be inundated with twitter spam (twam?). The novelty will turn annoyance.
