MattMaroon.com

I think I may be the only person in the entire world who is actually ambivalent about Twitter. Most people either love it or hate it, yet I find myself somewhere in the middle. I guess it’s just my contrarian nature imploding upon itself.

Unlike some of its more extreme fans, I don’t find it to be the template for all future communication, and while I’m not going to say it’s a fad, I am going to say it could be. It might not evaporate overnight like Crocs Inc’s share price, but I don’t feel like it has the staying power of Facebook.

I still maintain that it’s pretty hard to put anything more relevant than “im going 2 the gym” or “holy shit a plane just crashed into the hudson, that was so freakin awesome!!!” into 140 characters. (You can, however, link to more info, which has created a cottage industry of url shorteners, and a wave of ravingly-liberal geeks [redundant, I know] decrying them as the web’s newest dictators.) Neither of those are news, one’s simply annoying and the other is a headline. Twitter may have been (directly or indirectly) how a lot of people found out about a plane crash after it happened, but they spent a few minutes reading about it there and a few months reading about it on blogs and newspapers, and watching updates on TV.

On the other hand, unlike the haters, I kind of get why people like the site, and don’t think everyone who uses it is borderline retarded. It’s sort of a fun, open conversation, and the coolest thing about it (and the hardest thing to maintain going forward) is the community. Where else can you just talk to Shaq? After spending some time using it, I think anyone who thinks Twitter is “important” is nuts, but people who think it’s fun I understand.

I used to think Twitter would never catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. Now I realize I was exactly wrong. Twitter will catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. It’s blogging dumbed down for the masses, and if there’s one surefire way to build something popular, it’s to take something else that is already popular and simplify. My belief that it wouldn’t grow that large was actually more wishful thinking, not because I dislike anyone at Twitter but because I wanted to believe that humans were still able to tell or care about the difference between “headlines” and “news”. I like to think there’s some lower bound to our ADD, and that we reached it somewhere around Facebook. A brief perusal of cable TV, which I don’t subscribe to, would have dispelled that notion quickly enough for me, so I should probably stop prognosticating until I start receiving it again, or at least spend more time in airport bars.

Twitter has clearly hit some sort of tipping point lately, as evidenced by the drastic and sudden increase in the number of people over the age of 35 who I have to explain it to. There’s even action on whether or not they’ll be acquired in 2009. Given that it’s paying +250, the astronomical price tag that would be necessary given Twitter’s presumably high valuation as of the last funding round, and the severe reduction in acquisitions due to the miserable state of the economy, I really like the odds on “no acquisition” there. Even if they find a way to monetize, I think they’ve got a couple more years of independence ahead of them.

But despite their surge, I find myself using the service less and less. I’m just tired of it. It’s the sort of thing you really can’t do casually, and I just don’t have the time or desire to know exactly what beer every one of my friends is drinking right now.

And call me nuts, but no matter how often Twitter’s people go on Colbert and talk about how 140 characters inspires creativity, all I see when I look at Twitter are outdated limitations and people going to great pains to work around them. Limiting messages to 140 characters, all text, maybe made sense three years ago. Now everyone who uses it has a phone with a browser, because every phone has a browser. Even the crappy free-after-contract clamshell can view an image from a link. We don’t need TwitPic and bit.ly anymore, and I resent being forced to deal with them to do what I want to do with the service.

That’s why I’ve largely switched over to Posterous. It doesn’t force me to use antiquated SMS (though I think it offers that if you so desire). It will let me just send it a picture from my phone. I don’t have to worry about shortening URLs, and I don’t need some Adobe Air client just to make it tolerable. If I want to post something short and fast, it’s really easy (they have the best bookmarklet I’ve ever seen) and if I actually have something to say, I can do that too, rather than blogging it and then getting a tinyurl for it and then putting that on Twitter.

You’ve probably seen a number of posts here lately that ended in “via Posterous”. That’s because they’ve brilliantly included every viral hook known to man, letting your posts be automatically sent to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc., but in a way that actually makes sense and doesn’t feel bloated. In fact, I don’t know how they’ve made their site do so much so succinctly and so intuitively, but it’s a marvel of user interface/experience design.

So at the risk of sounding too much like a cheerleader, I’m going to call it right now. Posterous is a Twitter that doesn’t suck, and all the cool kids are going to end up there. I guess I’m not going too far out on a limb there given their traffic graph:

But I think they’re already a way better experience than Twitter, and they’re just getting started.

Whoops, there I go prognosticating again. Better sign back up for cable.

This entry was posted on April 20, 2009 at 11:46 am and is filed under Stupid Shit I Found On The Web . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.