Twitter is an insane worthless idea!
Why in the world would I call Twitter, who just turned down half a billion dollars ( in mostly stock from Facebook ), a worthless idea? Simple, because that’s exactly what most of us would have thought if we had come up with the idea ourselves.
Confession time: I don’t use Twitter (yet). In fact, until recently I didn’t truly understand what all the hype regarding Twitter was about. Sometimes products like this sound so fanciful that it’s hard to separate hype from reality and I have a knee jerk reaction to fads. Twitter has the hallmark signs of a fad if you listen to only the hype.
Every generation has its fads and seemingly crazy fixation with such fads and the 80s seemed to bring out the worst and cheesiest of them all; leg warmers over jeans, big hair, early-electric pop music and Atari. On second thought, I liked the Atari.
The 2000s saw the onslaught of reality TV (and coincidentally coincided at the same time I pretty much stopped watching TV). There is nothing realistic about this fad where ordinary people make public buffoons of themselves when put into completely unrealistic environments. Yet, people watch reality TV with an almost strange obsession and loyal dedication.
The success of Twitter and reality TV have much in common if you understand the twisted psychology behind the mystery.
What makes this kind of viewing so popular? People!
There is something ingrained in humans as social animals to want to watch people, follow them, talk about people’s lives, sometimes live through them and tie our association to them. Why is gossip popular? Because we love to know what goes on in other people’s lives and talk about it. Why do people refer to sports teams when they win as “our team won” and when they lose “they lost – those losers”? Because people associate themselves with winners and distance themselves from losers! Why do people follow celebrities? Because they associate themselves with whom they see as winners, at least as status symbols. People love to boast and brag about what they have, what they do and who they know. People love to seek attention.
Twitter has all of these aspects. Twitter lets people know what other people are up to all the time and receive that need for gossip directly. Twitter allows people to voyeur the lives of others. Twitter has social status and allows people to associate themselves with those of status, i.e. the winners. Twitter permits people to follow the lives of other people, including beloved celebrities and sports icons. Twitter makes it possible for people to gain status by gaining a following. Twitter allows for bragging rights like “kids had fun at Whistler today.” Twitter allows for attention seeking, e.g. “bad hangover - rough night!”
Reality TV instantly gives those on the show a form of celebrity status (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad) and allows viewers to associate with the winners and distance themselves from the losers as people follow their lives in a most unreal situation. It also permits the most softhearted of reality watchers to cheer for the underdog and take a certain form of pleasure in seeing an unlikely person promoted to a social status on a TV show that they might not have been able to achieve in “real life”. These people become the new gossip point amongst people watchers and a way for some to live beyond their own lives.
Obviously, Twitter is not without its legitimate uses. Rather than send out a message one at a time to everyone you know in your family or social group, you can send a broadcast message, for example “I arrived in Hawaii today. Plane ride was bumpy!” Twitter is an instant message broadcast system. Rather than annoy people with a message that pops up in their face as an instant message would, Twitter permits people to choose to monitor these messages, thus the system is completely voluntary and non-intrusive.
Why only 140 characters? Because that’s probably all that is actually required to get information across and more importantly, grab attention as a headline would, inspiring people to want to know more.
So, why is Twitter an insane worthless idea? Because Twitter is not a solution to an obvious need and won’t make money directly. Needs like “online dating services” or “sport score tracking” are much more obvious than “people watching, family and friend gossip, association, attention seeking and bragging rights”. Before anyone jumps down my throat, I’m not implying anyone who uses Twitter does so for only those reasons. Everyone has their own reason for using Twitter, but in my opinion, the social animal reasons are a huge driving force as to why the site is popular.
If I were to have sat down with my business partner or colleagues only to have come up with “Twitter”, I’m not sure I would have pursued the idea. Surely someone would have suggested it to be a dumb bird of an idea. Even if I did think up the human need for Twitter, as a business model, it’s not exactly the best model. Produce a free site… ???… huge profits. That’s something even Twitter hasn’t managed to figure out; how to make revenue – not yet at least. If Twitter had charged for the service, nobody would have paid. If Twitter had put advertising on the site, it would have been their downfall because someone else would have produced an ad-free Twitter in a month which would have made them dead dumb birds.
Why are they worth $500 million in mostly Facebook stock? Simple, they have huge popularity. Internet companies will pay big bucks for companies with wide audiences. Wide audiences make free services valuable as loss leaders and as a method to promote services which earn revenue. The problem is often over-inflation of valuation placed on popularity. Will popular sites translate into money earned? Will they end up being a huge expense? Worse, will the transfer in ownership and changes to the site drive the users that made the site valuable away?
Twitter will have to figure out how to make their site a loss leader for those who can make money from their users. Advertising and paid placement might be one way but they have to be very careful not to drive away their user base in the process. In fact, advertising might be so delicate a subject that it might be unworkable. Imagine ads showing up in RSS feeds mixed in with messages? Revolt! When sites start off with ads, it’s easier to maintain and explain them but when sites add ads in after, often users will rebel. The only way Twitter might be able to do so is through voluntary methods, much like YouTube or if they pleaded on the humanity of people to forgive them for needing revenue to stay a flight or force them to shut their doors.
Would anyone go into business with a service with zero revenue potential in the hopes that the user base will be large enough to be bought out by a big company one day? Or do so in blind faith believing that some magic process will suddenly show up to turn users into revenue? Well, the Twitter people did! Would most of us have done so? Probably not. Most of us would have thought the idea completely insane, worthless and without wings, unless we knew the magic solution of how to turn it into a loss leader for something else.
