- 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.
Posts Tagged ‘Business’
Arguments for implementing semantic interfaces
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008Further to arguments against semantics, there are also viable and strong value-adding arguments for semantics. These are:
Semantics give meaning to interfaces
This is by far the most important argument for semantics.
Using semantic mark-up on web pages gives web pages meaning!
Many web developers today still misunderstand the basic definition of semantics and can tend towards thinking that it is somehow about ‘the look of a page with style sheets turned off’, but, in fact, semantics are all about meaning of web pages.
The ‘meaning’ is important for both users (end users and developers of interfaces) as well as machines (which are just another form of users) such as search engine robots and (in future) various semantic interface harnessing tools and languages.
Semantics add value to interfaces
Semantics add value for all types of users.
Chances are not all users of a web site have a big screens, a mouse, a powerful PC, know what they are doing and see very well.
In fact, it is 100% certain that your web site has at least 1 very disabled user, but one that plays (perhaps) the most important role in your web site – Google search robot (also known as indexer).
Semantics aid usability and scalability
Properly developed semantic interfaces are very easy to scale up, re-style and re-organise (all positive and preferable features of any IT system).
Usability of semantic web sites is usually present both from end user perspective as well as from web site developer perspective.
Usability usually saves and earns more money. One example would be the fact that an easy to understand interface is easier for maintenance and upgrading, which saves developer time, which in turn saves money for an organisation.
As an example of usability feature presented by semantic interface would be ability to call a telephone number on a web page directly from Skype, if that telephone number has been marked up as a micro format.
One click and the end user is directly in a telephone conversation with your company’s sales department, generating business for your organisation.
Increases ROI by increasing findability and re-findability
One of the most important aspects of any web sites is that it needs to be findable and re-findable.
Semantic interfaces by their very nature and the fact that they are standards compliant tend to be naturally easier to find, analyse, understand and index for search robots.
The very fact that your interfaces are standards compliant tell search robots that you know what you are doing when it comes to web development and search engines tend to treat this factor very favourably.
In future it may be the case that only standards compliant web sites will be considered ‘valid’ solutions for showing up in search engine result pages.
The very fact that (for example) your e-commerce web site can be easily found will mean that you will obtain more visitors to your site, which ought to convert into more sales for your business.
This way, semantic interfaces become direct mechanisms through which ROI of a business can be increased, without implementing anything other than the standards which have been set out for us in order to make our lives simpler and faster, while increasing quality.
Semantics enable data sharing between applications
W3C standards are not enough in order to provide semantic interfaces.
Semantic interfaces are extensions to W3C standards and can provide much more meaning than just POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML).
With emergence of de-facto standards like micro formats, it has become possible to ’share’ data from one site with another site without much problems.
RSS feeds are also there to aid similar functionality, but micro formats create ‘interfaces as APIs’, meaning that any machine from anywhere could harvest useful data from your web site (such as your product offers) and make it available in the relevant section of their web site.
Excellent example is Google’s shopping section, which data mines product offers from various web sites on the web and then offers a comparison functionality to enable users of Google search engine to find the best deals across the web and shop from the related web sites.
Semantic interfaces can directly enable this type of functionality and is the reason why web sites like Amazon and Argos are the two most popular e-commerce web sites in UK.
Semantics enable leveraging of social networks
Apart from becoming more meaningful, the web is becoming more ‘personal’ and catered towards group of people with similar interests.
Social networks play a key role in creating these on-line communities and semantic mark-up is, once again, at the heart of enabling development and utilisation of meaningful social networks that work.
Micro formats, RSS and Atom feeds as well as RDF are just some of the examples of technologies which are making this functionality possible.
Less error prone interfaces
For a long time now I have believed in creating web sites without using browser specific hacks.
My latest development of Flexewebs CMS is a good example of how a nice web site can be created using valid (in this case XHTML1.0 Strict) HTML code and simple CSS rules in order to create a scalable and cross browser fast performing interface without any hacks.
Using XHTML1.0 Strict with W3C standards compliant mark up has always made my development life easier and created interfaces which are much easier to control using the usual development tools we have available to ourselves.
More ‘meaningful’ interfaces
Semantic interfaces are also able to communicate a corporate message in a much more meaningful manner than non-semantic interfaces.
Sharing your company’s contact details (for example) using micro formats is a much better approach than doing it in a proprietary, non-standard manner which cannot be easily found by various directories and search engines.
Arguments against semantic interfaces
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008In our day-to-day work on creating good quality web interfaces, we inevitably come across various arguments against using semantic and proper markup in order to develop interfaces. Some of these arguments may be one or more of the following:
Semantic interfaces will not make more money for the organisation
There are many companies out there that do not know what semantics are all about. After all semantics are only now being taught at Universities.
From that lack of understanding stems the lack of belief that semantic interfaces will add more value to business and therefore make more money for the organisation.
It could be almost impossible bringing a client up-to-date with what is currently going on with Internet and where it is all heading towards.
Usually one of the best ways to show someone value of semantics is to demonstrate a working example of where they have made a difference, but often this does not work as clients can be sceptical about whether the same or similar approach would work for their business.
Semantics may only benefit Google and Yahoo
Some companies who are a little more insightful about web technologies, various activities taking place between various ‘big players’ (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) may say that adding semantics to web pages is all about helping various data mining technologies do a quicker and better job of ’stealing’ data from various web sites and storing them in a very structured way into their own databases.
Later on, these big players will (one way or another) be making money through re-representing that data to their users in a way which, in the long term, may take users away from the initial web site where the data originated from.
This argument could potentially prove to be a very good one, but let’s wait and see what happens in the future.
An example here would be the situation of what happened with Google News, where many publishers were annoyed by the fact that their content was being harvested by Google to show a list of latest news headlines.
Publishers of news were annoyed about the fact that Google was comapring their content with competing newspapers’ content, as well as potentially stealing their advertising revenue, based on material which the newspapers wrote themselves in the first place.
Semantics are a (very) (fast) moving target
One day a micro format may look one way – another day it may change. Some clients may perceive things to be moving forward very fast, but in reality we all know this is not really the case.
If anything, things are moving too slowly forward (look at what happened with HTML5 vs. XHTML2.0 situation).
Clients may feel that constant changes which affect web user interfaces mean that ‘waiting for later’ in order to implement new features is a good idea. In reality this often proves to be a matter which loses the given company a competitive advantage.
Semantics are not really a standard
Semantics are at best a ‘tribally’ accepted set of ‘common practices’ and semantic developers disagree heavily amongst each other about what really constitutes proper semantic interfaces.
There is no be-all and end-all document which outlines all the possible situations which web developers could find themselves in from project to project. What should standard implementations then be?!
Yahoo may come up with some common patterns to use when developing for web, but may of these patterns in practice show to be an overkill or not fitting the purposes for whatever reason. Yahoo’s patterns are often suitable for ‘mega-sites’ like Yahoo itself, but not necessarily for smaller and medium sites.
Many companies simply do not care about semantics on their web sites
For most companies the age old approach of ‘just get it done’ still rules the business.
Nike made billions out of it by rephrasing that into ‘Just do it’, but in IT domain this approach is incredibly dangerous and creates solutions which are virtually impossible to maintain even in the short term and take many times longer to develop in the first place, with many more people than really needed.
This is arguably one of the biggest problems web developers may come across today when trying to implement proper solutions.
Bottom line is that clients care about money and time and web developers (wrongly) jump to conclusions that implementing semantic and standards compliant solutions will take more money and more time for the client. In fact, in practice it ought to take less time and money! All it requires is a an appropriate enough approach.
Use W3C as reference for semantics
Sunday, May 25th, 2008I find it astonishing to see how many developers create their own sense of modern web technologies based on various snippets of information they gather from all around the web.
Unfortunately information nowadays usually comes from amateur developers with too much spare time to spend on forums and various mailing lists, but not enough time spent trying to implement solid, scalable and useful semantic solutions.
The best place to learn about semantics from is, of course, W3C, which is the closest thing to ’standards’ we have on the web.
I have had a privilege to work directly for an organisation which is an active member of W3C and have been forced to think about pros and cons of (X)HTML and its implementations and definitions.
This experience has taught me to reference the documentation as often as I need to.
Remember, no-one is expected to know everything off by heart, but at the same time you should not make up solutions based on your gut feelings, unless you are 100% sure about what you are talking about.
W3C is contributed to by very talented engineers and people from world’s leading corporations (i.e. Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc.), who know what they are talking about and have experience working on truly global web-based projects.
Chances are that (however sceptical you might be about each one of these companies) these people know a thing or two about what is happening on the Web and what ought to be happening in the future for the good of us all.
Once you try to propose something a little more meaningful towards a W3C specification you soon become aware of the real strengths and weaknesses of your proposal and work out that it might be useful for you, but not necessarily for the entire world, which is the whole point of Web technologies and the Web itself.
In order not to be preaching any further I find it very useful to refer to the following documents as often as it is necessary:
- (X)HTML 1.0 Strict
- WCAG1.0
- Quality tips for webmasters (useful for pointing content managers and editors to)
Using just those three documents as much as possible will get you very far in the world of semantics and proper UI web developement.
I have been studying them for many years now and some subtle points from those documents still strike me as very interesting and wise even today.