Why Twitter Has Failed: The Power of Time and Mainstream

August 11th, 2008 Comments

twitter To a certain extent Twitter is a mass failure. Andy DeSoto points out hints of Twitter’s failure thus far with “What the iPhone Application Store tells us about Twitter”. While Twitter is a major hit within our web bubble, it’s a major failure in the real world.

       

Twitter and Mainstream Success

Now don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter. I’m considered one of the “go-to” women for Twitter advice, apps, and more. I’ve done so many Twitter posts and reviews that I’ve had to give it its own category. So, guess what? I not only love Twitter, but I understand Twitter. While Twitter enjoys it’s meager success from a wide variety of users, they’re all in the same bubbles: Tech, Design, PR. Twitter really doesn’t go very far outside of these bubbles. The mainstream users of Myspace and Facebook have little to no clue about Twitter. And while it has been picking up mentions in the press, it hasn’t been picking up in mainstream usage.

Over two years later and Twitter is still a small phenomenon. I wouldn’t recommend anyone outside of the aforementioned bubbles to get on Twitter because the focus of conversations and communities are very specific to those bubbles and their latest topics/gossips. Twitter is practically useless for anyone who wants to learn more about dancing ballet or riding horses. While it can extend into these niches, it hasn’t. It hasn’t caught on and spread into other industries besides the one that gave it its wings.

     

Preaching To The Choir

All in all, Twitter’s been preaching to the same choir for over two years. If that’s not a failure on the mainstream scale, I don’t know what is. Twitter isn’t a failure overall. It’s not dying, nor am I predicting its demise. I’m simply stating that Twitter has yet to achieve success in the real world of mainstream users with way more eclectic tastes than those users in the bubbles that are already on Twitter.

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  • I love Twitter too. But when I speak of it around the workplace (information technology service people), most say: "what's that?"

    I see its increasing growth in its application to status feeds on websites, and its benefit as a social media optimisation tool. Perhaps Twitter will simply be relegated to that: a search engine optimisation phenomena only utilised for website promotion?

    We'll see. Meanwhile, I will continue to use ping.fm and watch which "status update" service (e.g. "Pownce") gets the limelight.

    It's an exciting time to be on the Web, eh?!
  • If ...or rather... when it catches on to the "mainstream" it has the potential to become very noisy and much less productive. But watching it evolve is part of the mystery and beauty of all things 2.0

    Either the tweens haven't found out about it yet or they're not interested

    In the meantime, I am enjoying connecting with other DotComPreneurs

    http://www.Twitter.com/jillkoenig
  • I was referred to this article by someone wanting to know about Twitter shutting it's doors.

    Failure? ... Hardly.

    Not main stream? .. of course, we're just getting started
  • I agree that Twitter has not yet "broken through" to the public consciousness like Facebook and MySpace. But I think Corvida's analysis misses two key points.

    First, is that Twitter is such novel concept it is going to take longer to catch on anyway. Also, it's growth has been phenomenal and it has been reported in the mainstream press. So it is being noticed.

    Second, it has had considerably scalability problems which may have inhibited growth but more to the point has helped competitors such as Plurk and identi.ca. So a more meaningful analysis would be of the microblogging space generally and how this is growing and evolving. I suspect that a closer inspection would show that the recent growth could not have been sustained if the usage was only among techies and geeks, but that regular users are using it too.
  • Personally I don't think Twitter will be around in 5 years time.
  • I also wonder about what happens when Twitter does become mainstream and everyone starts using it. Until those guys work out the scalability issues, I can wait. The ratio of noise to signal will increase dramatically. Be careful what you wish for…
  • i disagree, and you are comparing Twitter to FB/MySpace? And those sites have been are for how long, and twitter is what, 2 years old?
  • Facebook/Myspace we major hits within their first two years of coming out with mainstream. At 20 months Myspace had already gained 14 million unique visitors a month.
  • Persistance
    I work across tech and social policy circles and i love twitter too. i like the design, short (almost real time) posts from "outside - in", and hope it never tends towards constant chatter me-think of facebook\myspace.

    It is a firehose and for that reason will likely shift thinking on measures of socnet success from traffic based to influence based. check cnn and cspan for mainstream influence.
  • I agree with what you're saying. On the other hand, it's also true that there are small niche communities using Twitter in lots of other fields. My own -- higher education -- is an example. It certainly hasn't caught on among college faculty, but there is a sizeable number of educational technology people using it heavily, and it's spread slightly into the education crowd more generally (i.e., outside of educational technology). I wish it were more popular, though, because I think there are great possibilities for its use in education, but only if it becomes sufficiently widespread to achieve a critical mass. I also think that Saandstorm is right -- most "mainstream" folks are not interested in signing up for yet another thing.
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