Why Twitter Is NOT As Hot As Everyone Thinks

by Daniel Hollister • 03/08/2008 at 12:29 PM

Is less always more? Is small always big? If you looked at any of the hot stories over the past few days surrounding Twitter, you might be convinced of it.

Twitter has been getting lots of attention recently, being called the next Facebook, the next big social network, the next big [insert analogy here]. And while I am sure Twitter is growing rapidly, those markets are entirely different. Twitter is not equipped at all to be considered a social network on the scale of Facebook or MySpace, and the notion that it is not only in the big leagues with those guys but might surpass it is laughable.

I thought it was necessary to point out the inherent flaws in that idea preventing Twitter from going big time. While often times less is more in web apps, I don’t think Twitter’s limitations truly prove that theory to the majority of people wishing to stay in touch with friends.

1) You’re limited to 140 characters. The biggest limitation is also the most obvious. 140 characters might be fun for status updates and phone-friendly conversation, but not enough. Direct messages are bound by this limitation as well. I don’t know about you all, but often times if I’m trying to keep in touch with old friends, I occasionally have a lot to say to someone on their wall or in a message. 140 characters is simply laughable as an end-all to online social interaction.

2) Way too much clutter. Twitter’s downfall is actually how popular it is. The front page of the site only alerts you of the 20 most recent updates from your friends. If you have any significant number of friends, or if any of them update frequently, your Twitter home page could only show you the last few minutes, forcing you to either check the website an ungodly number of times per day or subscribe to the text messages. Texting, though, provides the same problem: clutter. How many hundreds of messages are you willing to receive in a day?

3) You can pick between breadth or depth, but not both. If you have too many friends, you get too many messages to deal with. If you want to really get updates often from those you care about the most, you have to sacrifice following, well, most people.

4) He who is most annoying, succeeds the most. Inevitably at some point you will befriend That Guy Who Updates Every Five Minutes. Upon viewing the website or glancing at your cell phone, it will be dominated by a handful of people. And herein lies the problem – everyone will post updates at different frequencies, and those that don’t update as often, or more specifically, those who do not update most recently from when you check your phone or website, get left out in the crowd. And trust me, more text does not mean better quality or higher importance. You’re left to choose between either de-friending someone you are interested in, or simply letting them totally dominate your profile.

5) Archiving sucks. If you happen to miss your friend’s update about that event they were at the other night, your only real option is to go find their profile and scroll through recent updates until you find it. You can’t even search through updates, including your own.

6) Nobody wants to use it. Let’s face it, the only reason we use social networks is to stay in touch with our friends, and if our friends aren’t there, we have no purpose in being there. You could say this about any new social network, but Twitter is different in that most people don’t understand it. Most of my non-geek friends who I’ve gotten to try out Twitter found it too boring and limited (which it is) to really spend any time on it. Generally if you have a better product, the trouble is getting people to try ours out to begin with. Even when people are encouraged (forced) to try out Twitter by their friends, most don’t get it and don’t stay.

7) It doesn’t do anything. Do you honestly think the reason Facebook applications are exploding is because we’re all secretly dying for simplicity? Did I mention the 140 character limit? Twitter does not do anything. If you removed every feature of Facebook except the status update and the RSS feed, you’d have Twitter.
The fact that Twitter is even getting this kind of positive press is mindblogging to me. Keep in mind that I write this as an active (and rather addicted) Twitter user. I like Twitter – there are many things it does well. Twitter is great for getting real-time event highlights, having a short, casual conversation (smalltalk, you mightsay) with a small group of friends, marketing yourself to fans, or following the lives of people who you don’t generally have access to in a way that feels more personal than a blog.

But Twitter is not a Facebook replacement. It is not in that same market of the big social networks, and it certainly cannot hold a candle to any of them when it comes to what we really want: to stay in touch with our friends. We want to post photos, see photos, write a couple paragraphs to someone we haven’t talked to for a while, post a 30-character status when we don’t feel like doing anything else, seeing an feed of not just what our friends type but what they’ve done lately.

So I ask again – why all the attention for something so small?