I'm a longstanding Twitter skeptic.
I'm convinced that its importance is vastly over-blown by the media industry itself, especially lazy journalists who use it as a quick barometer of opinion. Nobody "real" actually seems to use it, just a few people who either like talking to themselves, or who like the external validation of lots of "followers" (celebrities, politicians, social media commentators and other assorted narcissists). Some of my friends in the tech PR community have also succumbed to it, despite my attempts at re-educating them.
So I found it deeply amusing that an even more annoying social web phenomenon has now grown much larger than Twitter - the intensely irritating Farmville apparently has 69m users - a subset of Facebook's 350m. I'm one of the other 280m who've switched off all Farmville notifications from our addicted friends.
An early prediction for 2010-11: Twitter falters a bit..... then gets acquired by some wannabe media-turned-social-media company... then disappears into a black hole to join PointCast, FriendsReunited, Second Life and Friendster as one of the long list of Internet has-beens. And it's joined shortly thereafter by Farmville as well, in a pleasing sort of symmetry.
Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Thought-leading wireless industry analysis
3 comments:
Sorry Dean, cant agree with you on this one. In the last few days Twitter has enlightened me with critical information from my contacts such as 'Making Pancakes' and 'I'm taking the dog for his morning walk'. I am just going to update mine right now 'Disagreeing with that Bubbly chap'
I'm the opposite. I left Facebook to go to Twitter since it allows 1 way relationships. Sure I have 900+ followers since I'm an online editor at a fairly large technology site, but I only follow the 90 or so people I care about.
Facebook started bothering me when it was taking over every single point of interaction between me and my friends.
I wrote an article as to why I dumped Facebook: http://www.intomobile.com/2009/08/31/push-versus-pull-relationships-and-why-i-left-facebook.html
My friends actually post pictures of their farms in albums on Facebook! Mafia Wars is just as bad.
I still think that Facebook is not doing all that much, but what made it so popular was the simple ability to resize your photos automatically before uploading.
Personally I can't wait till we have a Facebook MVNO, possibly a global one! Then they can include voice calls and SMS between friends in the stream of inanity published to the world.
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