Shhh, no one is on Twitter

What’s Twitter?

You mean that thingy that I can see on FriendFeed?

There is some level of credibility to Kara’s post. My wife could care less about Twitter. So could some of my friends. A lot of people on Twitter right now are the “early adopters” and the average person doesn’t do early adoption.

Just like with MySpace and Facebook, Twitter does offer something and it will catch on in the mainstream but it will take some time like the other social networks did.

Kara’s friends aren’t on it yet, but they probably will be in the next couple of years.

I have people question twitter to me all the time. Yet 100% of my friends who are on it a lot have sworn by the connections they have made from their twitting.

I have met dozens of people whom I now seem to know who do not live near by. However locally in Austin I have met dozens whom I do now know personally and who have become part of my network.

I know a little about the power of networking and see twitter as just another tool to help build relationships. But like any tool, you need to learn how to use it and then actually use it.

You don’t need to think back as far as the Apple II…just look back 3 years ago at blogs. Most people did not know what they were (even those who read them regularly did not know they were not just websites). Now few would admit to not knowing about Blogs.

Twitter still has a long way to go to be mainstream, but there are many people who are using it regularly…so those who don’t still might in the near future.

And heck, it is just fun sometimes to know what Scoble is doing at any given moment.

thom

Hey, I bought an Apple ][ back in ’79 for $2,600. Back then 16K RAM cost $300! I also got 2 floppy drives with that, but they were back-ordered because they hadn’t yet come out.

Loved that machine. It’s what got me started in this computer thing!

I found it funny that the past 10 months my wife would ask what this twitter thingy was on the desktop when she would jump on my computer. She is a nestie. thenest.com, a website for married women. Well skip forward to last week and she asked me how to get an account because a bunch of “nesties” had accounts and she wanted to follow and become an active member in that part of the community. The question isn’t when mainstream will hit, it should be how fast the different stages of adoption will be.

Robert,

You should try SocialToo.com’s Auto-Follow – it’s much better than Twitter’s. It has blacklist functionality that you can add users you don’t want it to ever follow, and it will even auto-blacklist usernames if more than 30% of the SocialToo.com userbase blacklists an individual (as that userbase grows I’ll be modifying the blacklisting algorithm).

In addition to that, in the next couple days you’ll see the ability to send a automated, custom message to your new followers. Any other frustrations with Twitter (or any other social network for that matter) let me know and I’ll look into incorporating them – it was actually inspired by @chrispirillo and @guykawasaki mentioning their own frustrations. They were two of our first users.

Disclaimer – I wrote SocialToo.com, if you couldn’t tell.

I think twitter, like a lot of the social sites, are in the early adopter stage. Techies are talking about it, but I don’t know one non-tech person who has a Twitter account.

The burden of time will determine if it is too new (more people will use) or not understood (some more will use, but not wide spread).

However, saying you get a tweet a second isn’t exactly a fair measuring tool. You work with, meet, and blog too tech people…if you weren’t getting a tweet a second, it would mean that the service is down.
http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/19/productivity-up-200-twitter-is-down/

Well, Robert, when you follow 21,227 people who are, by the fact that they got your attention are more active than average users of twiter, you’re going to get a few tweats no matter how close to dead the service is.

Compare twitter’s numbers to the 1,000,000,000 PC users or the tens of millions of users of each of the major IM systems and get back to us.

I’m on twitter and I’m trying to get it … but I don’t get it. It is a good way to stay up on all the uninteresting things people do, and all the egocentric streams of consciousness. Just what every eroding society needs. Every once in a while you catch something useful. I’d say it’s about 99% noise, 1% content. OK, maybe less on the content.

Or maybe I become exponentially more curmudgeonly the older I get. :p

@ Brian, I think you make an excellent point about it being a highway of ego centric babbling. Yet, at some level it offers a sense of connectedness that appeals to the digerati. That said, I’m on it, my handle is: labjuice. Now let me wander to some other remote region of the intertubes.

Peter.

Until a few months ago I didn’t see why people found it useful. Then I decided to check it out, mostly as a lurker. At some point it just clicked and I’m hooked on the real-time information feed. At our company we decided to build a tool to track what people are saying:

http://twist.flaptor.com

For example, see how much people mention this site and what they say. It’s been on the “hot concept” list twice this past week:

http://twist.flaptor.com/?gram=scobleizer

Robert, I think you’re missing the main point she’s eluding to in her article. Twitters users have a very specific psychograph. So limited right now — it is not considered to be mainstream.

So it’s a little disheartening to read your post when you “Robert Scoble” tech guru, are blind to miss the fact Twitter isn’t as popular as you assume it is. Maybe in “your world” it’s popular. But, those 21,227 people you are following is made up of a very specific psychograph. It can be said, in it’s current state, Twitter is not made up of a user base that has mass appeal like the most popular social networks (MySpace, Facebook).

Bottom line — you can’t deny the fact Twitter mostly comprised of a user base that is “tech savvy” and generally “early adopters”. If you were to do a random poll on a street corner people would likely;

A.) Not even know what Twitter is.
B.) If they do know of Twitter, there’s an even less of a probability that they use the service, and use it on a regular basis.

I can tell you coming from a person here in Kansas City, the majority of people in the Midwest have never even heard of Twitter. Furthermore, most don’t see it to be of much value to sign-up and use it. Generally speaking, only people who’s professional careers that have a direct tie or value-add, do you find actually using Twitter. It isn’t a generational gap thing either. My mom isn’t on Twitter, she’s over 50-years-old, and she does fit the profile as a technograph of a “pessimist” (Forrester Research term). My sister isn’t on Twitter either, she’s a senior in college, and very much fits the technograph of a “optimist” (Forrester Research term). I’d also know that 98% of my friends who are 20-something’s are also not on Twitter either. Nor have/did they joined after I explained the value and concept behind it.

I personally find Twitter of value because it’s a toolset that supports my professional career while being a great compliment to augmenting my own personal social media interests. However, I do also accept the fact it has limitations as it’s own niche as a social network. I find it very hard to agree (and frankly shift uncomfortably in my seat) when Twitter Evangelists blog, post, speak on how Twitter is the “next big thing” and saying “everyone should Twitter”. It will take more than ‘performance upgrades’ to the platform to engage a mass appeal to Twitter. What is that you ask? I believe it will require an entire shift of thinking for mass personal social acceptance of the mere “concept” of Twitter.

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Ramsey
ramsey@ramseym.com

You are a super-early adopter. Not everyone’s on Twitter. I don’t really use it at all. When I signed up initially, it was almost indecipherable as to what to do.

Nice bumping into you and meeting you in person at Web 2.0 last Wednesday.

John: only 1/6th of the world is even on PCs. So, we’re ALL early adopters!

I agree, it is early. But I find it much more appealing than I ever found Myspace/Facebooks. There is just too much with those networking sites, Twitter is simple/concise, like the good ‘ole days of AOL>AIM

When I first joined Twitter last fall, I went to see if my friends were on it. I started with my MySpace friends, who included some teenagers (former exchange students) and others who I thought fit in the Twitter demographic. I asked them if they were on Twitter, and none of them was.

In addition, I’ve realized that my negative assessment of Twitter’s continued viability is probably wrong. The stories about the funding, the potential of Twitter breaking into the mainstream, all indicate that Twitter is still on a growth path, even though the bleeding edges have passed it by.

My only question – if 20 million people join Twitter, are they ready?

Ontario: in just the past week 1,000 have followed me, so someone is definitely joining up (and they just passed a million users, too).

The biggest thing people have to realize with Twitter is that it isn’t a place to connect to people you already know, it’s a place to connect to new people. And that is so hard to inform people of, because they have no one to tell them.

Robert, sure you get a tweet / second, but how many of those people did you know personally prior to getting on Twitter? Because you are so involved in the tech world, take your number, and divide it by 1000, cause that’s everyone else’s number. Most people know 0-2 people who are on Twitter prior to signing up. I knew 0 people when I signed up, and it took me 18 months before I actually started using it on a daily basis. There is an extremely steep learning curve with Twitter, not because it is complicated, but because it is simple, almost too simple. People don’t inherently “get” it.

I don’t know what will push Twitter into the mainstream, but like Ramsey said, something will have to shift in the way people perceive social networks before that happens. The first thing people do on Myspace/facebook is add their friends. 99.99999999% of people can’t add more than 1 or 2 people on Twitter, and that’s the biggest drawback with the service right now. The vast majority of voices on Twitter are those the tech world early adoptees. My gf signed up for twitter at my urging, but she’s still kinda lost with what to do, and there’s really no one of interest for her to follow aside from getting local weather updates or CNN’s breaking news feed.

The change will occur when something radically different occurs than what we have now. Desktop apps (Twitterific / Twhirl) threw Twitter into the mainstream with the tech crowd, and we’ll need something equally disruptive before Paris Hilton starts twittering.

It’ll happen, just not sure when or how.

@derek

Twitter may or may not be going mainstream, but it is getting polluted.

I personally created four separate accounts: all of which you follow by the way.

Two of them have never been posted to, one is sent a random line of text every five minutes using the Twitter API, and one I update with a fictitious daily status.

All of these twitter accounts get one or two new followers a day, people I don’t know, who are following over a thousand other people, in some cases over ten thousand people.

This level of noise may kill Twitter before it gets widely adopted.

What’s with all this “early adopter” talk. It’s people of the “early adopter” demographic that are using Twitter — not because Twitter is new. That’s part of the problem, converting people who aren’t within that demographic type which is a part of making Twitter a mainstream product.

Twitter launched in July of 2006. It’s far from new.

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@ramseym

Kara didn’t ask her friends; she essentially asked 100 random people at a wedding in Washington, DC. Washington is focused on politics, and not the coolest new technology.

I expect that you’d get the same response pretty much anywhere if you asked the same question.

I hate twitter.
http://stuffgodhates.wordpress.com/

@18 passed a million users or passed a million tire-kickers? The better measure would how many of those “users” use it at least once a week? The more accrate statement is no one of any consequence is regularly ok twitter

I still maintain that Twitter is a feature, not a product.