- Twitter is not going to be highly profitable ever, as the ‘ad game’ will always be dominated by ‘clever algorithms’ which will always be owned by Google. Twitter will not be able to compete with this. Twitter’s earning potentials are not as wide as the earning potentials of FaceBook and Google who have the scope to expand their services to anything and everything they want to.
- Novelty factor will wear out and early adopters will become bored of using it. They already are in many cases
- Too many people will start spamming the posts. They already are, using automated tools to follow random people mentioning a target key word.
- Automated bots will take over the service (and have already done so) for SEO or other reasons, posting tweets in order to try and SEO their web sites through ‘organic’ means.
- People will move onto ‘cleverer’ ways of marketing and having ‘conversations’, just like they have moved on from blogging to twittering.
- Most people do not Twitter about one topic only, which will be confusing for those interested in following only serious discussions. This will create lots of useless and uninteresting tweets for the followers.
- When following many people it is virtually impossible to make any sense of the service as there are too many updates happening at any point in time and Twitter tends to take over one’s life totally and completely. Users will realise sooner or later this way of communicating is not maintainable and will start using the service less, which will in turn wear down the usefullness of the service which is mostly about semi-real-time conversations.
- It is impossible to have a proper, meaningful conversation over it on any semi-serious subject.
- Competition will take users elsewhere over time as it has done with many other social networks.
- ‘Clone services’ will offer companies a specific ‘Twitter clone solutions’ which suit the company behaviour and needs. An average user may find themselves having to Twitter in many different locations, which will become cumbersome and hard to keep track of. They are already twittering on Twitter and Facebook at least. ‘Twitter clone solutions’ are already available on the market and will be used by companies for internal communications purposes.
- Twitter is too simple and requires too many 3rd party services in order for anything more clever to be done with it. This means that users are potentially going to need to use two or three different Twitter applications installed on their machine in order to do everything they want to do with Twitter. This is asking too much of users and most users will not want to do this.
- Users will not want to Twitter in many places and FaceBook or similar service will take over the market share with time as they have a wider market appeal and people are more reliant on FaceBook and Google for example.
- Advanced capabilities will be too hard for average people to grasp (some users I have spoken to have problems adapting to service and I know other people who do not understand the concept at all and possibly never will).
- The whole concept is too far fetched for most people to understand and requires imagination in order for anyone to make use of it in any meaningful way. Most people do not have the required imagination and attention span in order to user Twitter for anything worth while for them, hence they will not ever see the point in using it.
- People will not want to share their day-to-day activities with the world in future and will feel that anything short they say in real time will be more than lost in the see of tweets which will polute the world in any second of any day. It will be very difficult to stand out.
- There are potentially major security risks associated with Twitter and as those risks become exploited over time, the brand will become less and less appealing to most people, leading to lesser popularity and slow death over time.
- Twitter’s exponential growth will mean that there is much of ‘junk information exchange’ from auto-bots and various other bolted on algorithms going on the site, not adding value to users, while adding an expensive overhead to Twitter’s bottom line. This will be almost completely unsustainable in a very short period of time.
- There is no specific Twitter microformat standard which would enable simpler aggregation of Twitter content from across the web.
- Twitter will find it virtually impossible to provide users with tweets which are relevant to their needs and interests as algorithms for these requirements will be far to complex and will use up too many server side resources to be run on daily basis
- Company behind Twitter does not have the intellectual and corporate capacity to expand fast enough to serve the demand, making their success and popularity eventually lead to their own destruction with time.
Written by Jason Grant, BSc, MSc on 20th April 2009
None of this would be a problem if twitter was decentralised and had its own protocol. That way twitter enthouisasts would be responsible for running their own servers. The problem with decentralised twitter is that it makes searching harder – a search might only go as far as your server and your friend’s servers. It would solve the spam problem unless you set up a few dedicated search servers that would bring back the spam again
Dankoozy on 20th AprilIf there was a Twitter specific microformat, accepted by developers and general standards authority, your decentralised argument would most probably work a treat.
The whole idea would then be the ‘ownership’ of whoever owns the microformat, or simply be another Open Source mega hit like Linux for example.
There would not be much money to make from it for any given company also.
Jason Grant on 20th AprilI agree with that a 110 per cent. If they don’t add more features and solve the above mentioned problems they won’t survive.
I have only seen technology savvy people using twitter, such as bloggers and internet marketing experts.
Others don’t understand twitter and are happy with facebook and other networks.
Dhiren on 15th June@Dhiren Your point about Twitter being used by tech-savvy people only is well observed in my experience. I have actually tweeted about many fairly IT skilled people not really understanding how to use Twitter at all.
Jason Grant on 15th JuneHi there. Visiting from mezzoblue.
I used twitter once, and that lone experience was enough to convince me that regular users are one of more of the following: bored, lonely, pathetic, vain, self-important, mentally ill.
Yes, the whole thing will fail. And when it does, all the bored, lonely and pathetic people will simply move on to the next fad.
The trick, of course, is to be man who comes up with the next fad. And to make it profitable.
Easier said than done.
Andrew on 28th JuneI find Twitter absolutly useless!!
Stan on 27th July