11-08-2013, 02:45 PM
My worry with Twitter is that it has a similar weakness to Facebook, but much moreso: it's a service that's built on a concept that's not unique and it could go away [become unpopular and get replaced] just as easily as any other online messaging service.
Facebook at least has some anchor in that there's a sense of investment -- you've built up your profile and you have all these photos and a long history of events and messages that you may be loath to recreate on some other service. Twitter has connections but those are easily remade on a new service. There's nothing I see really tying users to it.
Probably the most interesting thing that could happen to Twitter would be for some other service (like Facebook or Google) to eventually buy them.
Still, "short broadcast text messaging" is popular and probably not going away any time soon. Twitter's advantage over Facebook is that they don't have the bulky overhead. You don't get spammed by your Aunt's religious meme shares or photos of people's cats. It's just short text messages which I suspect is why people like it.
But then again, that also suggests that they could easily ruin it if they monetize it in the wrong way. If they make it annoying, I believe people can and will jump ship quickly.
Facebook at least has some anchor in that there's a sense of investment -- you've built up your profile and you have all these photos and a long history of events and messages that you may be loath to recreate on some other service. Twitter has connections but those are easily remade on a new service. There's nothing I see really tying users to it.
Probably the most interesting thing that could happen to Twitter would be for some other service (like Facebook or Google) to eventually buy them.
Still, "short broadcast text messaging" is popular and probably not going away any time soon. Twitter's advantage over Facebook is that they don't have the bulky overhead. You don't get spammed by your Aunt's religious meme shares or photos of people's cats. It's just short text messages which I suspect is why people like it.
But then again, that also suggests that they could easily ruin it if they monetize it in the wrong way. If they make it annoying, I believe people can and will jump ship quickly.