Twitter: The Gateway Drug to Social Networking
When I began working on a project that taught Twitter to the masses, the service was still small with only a couple of celebrities and American mainstream media didn’t know the definition of tweet. My project is still going strong but there was a phrase I coined that, “Twitter is The Gateway Drug to Social Networking.” I still feel Twitter has that potential but honestly, this is no longer the case in Twitter’s current form.
What inspired this quote was when I compared Twitter to other social networks and realized that Twitter has the easiest point of entry and is really that easy compared to other networks. Facebook & Myspace are the top two US social networks and joining these can be a bit of a challenge for people who weren’t born in after 1980. The issue isn’t that 30 and over web users don’t understand social networking, it’s that the amount of people they relate to and interact with aren’t on social networks. Why join a network to connect with friends when there aren’t any friends there to connect with. Twitter is different.
In the most extreme case, my grandmother would join Twitter and experience something so basic that involves updating her status. What seems like a completely idiotic thing to do at 71 years old, it’s easy to do and requires no more than a text message or dial up Internet connection. I’m sure that if she saw it on television enough, she’d try it out. The beauty of Twitter is that so many people are searching it every day and right below my grandmother’s info is a link to search Twitter or, “What people are doing right now.” She can search knitting, bbq, fishing, farming and even sweet potato pie and instantly find other people with interests or performing those actions RIGHT NOW. With as little as two clicks, she’s following someone with at least one similar interest as her and this become something fun to her.
Soon, she may connect with family members and build up more followers. 1 year later, my grandmother has heard so much mention of Facebook on Twitter.com that she decides to sign up. She’s not web-savvy yet but she knows copy and paste so she posts a link on Twitter to her facebook.com/cool-granny profile. Soon, she has 10 friend requests and she’s successfully joined Facebook and found some people to connect with.
Do you see what just happened? My grandmother, who is not the ideal member of Facebook.com and would never join because she has no one to talk to has successfully transitioned to Facebook.com after simply joining Twitter and talking about what she’s doing. It’s a truly beautiful thing and completely possible with Twitter but never would have happened if she joined Facebook.com a year ago with no contacts.
The reason why this story and my idea of Twitter and its title of “The Gateway Drug to Social Networking” is because the system is flawed now and I blame The API+Simplicity of the system.
Twitter has done an amazing job at creating a web standards system that allows ANYONE to develop applications for it that can pretty much do anything. I’ve seen amazing things performed with the Twitter API and this is part of the reason they’re successful. I’ve heard that 90% of Twitter’s traffic comes from The API which is a testament of this simplicity. Why does the API get the poor rating?
The Twitter API & Search API can be completely pwn3d meaning you can use them to your advantage to cause really annoying things to happen. Now when grandma joins Twitter and talks about knitting, she gets replies from companies trying to sell her things. These are auto-replies when she simply mentions knitting. She also now gets about 20 followers a day from accounts of naked woman asking her to check out their cam-site. The worst of all, as if that wasn’t bad enough is that she might follower a spammer back by accident and now her phone or inbox notifies her with direct messages from these spammers.
This is something the Internet Generation is used to but my 71 year old grandmother will see it as advertisements, pornography and more advertisements and she’ll leave. She needed a simple system to help her find new friends on the web and now she’s confused and overwhelmed which is exactly what happens when you first join Facebook or Myspace. This issue is only getting worse and for over 6 months, Twitter has done nothing to combat these issues.
Let’s also briefly touch on trending topics. These were pretty awesome up until around 4 months ago when more API goodness was used to hack these trends. Now there are bots that have bios linking to sex camera sites and free auction houses that simply tweet out what topics are currently trending. Why is this bad? Well it’s ok if you follow one of these that once an hour tweets out the topic but these systems tweet out every minute or more what topics are trending and thus make the trending topic completely useless and impossible for you to find out why the topic was originally trending. It also keeps something trending. Taco Bell starts trending and then 5,000 spam accounts start tweeting every minute that the topic is trending and now everyone has stopped talking about it but that topic continues to stay on top for quite a while! This problem isn’t going away.
Going back to my grandmother for a second, now she always sees a ton of topics that are confusing and when she clicks them, she sees a ton of spam. Is this advertising too? She probably doesn’t know how to collapse this sidebar and it’s just an annoyance. At the end of 48 hours, my grandmother leaves Twitter and decides that The Internet isn’t for her and that’s that.
What’s unfortunate is that this horrible truth will ultimately lead to Twitter’s failure. As more and more networks see that 80% of their followers are photos of nude woman and trending topics are full of spam it will cause media networks and celebs to also give up on Twitter which have accounted for most of the site’s growth in the past 8 months.
By fixing these API hijack tools, they ruin functionality of honest and awesome sites built around Twitter. It will be a sad day in Twitter history but I see no other solution.
My Twitter eco-system is fine aside from the fact my last 500 followers were spammers and I get 10 replies a day from companies trying to sell me things. i deal with this but most users won’t. This patience will eventually wear out and Twitter will not get those users back. Until further notice, Twitter is not, “The Gateway Drug to Social Networking” but it can redeem itself. I hope this title will be re-enacted soon because right now, it’s not looking like a very bright future.
