hypios

But…Twitter isn’t that good

Sure, Twitter is a good product.  The application interface is accessible and wide open. It’s a real-time social bookmarking tool that’s original in terms of virality and network recommendation. This stream fits with some people’s needs to organize content. But honestly, it’s not that good. Following too many people (something that we, @hypios, admittedly do, as we follow pretty much everyone who follows us) makes the stream change so quickly that it’s impossible to really ‘follow.’ Follow fewer people, though, and it gets boring; you’ll just see the same excessive twitterers on your network.

Then there’s the functionality. I won’t go too far into that, but  it’s maddening that there’s no ’select all and delete’ option for the 200 daily automated direct messages you’ll get (which are not at all distinguished, by the way, from the real ones).  You have to click on every single one of them. “Delete all” a feature that you have with every simple email account. I’ll stop here, but to reiterate, it’s not that good.

But then why is everyone talking about it?

One billion search results in Google: five times more than “Obama.” Impressive, right? But let’s have a closer look at these results. The first page: Twitter.com, About page, Wikipedia article, Crunchable profile… But when you go deeper into the results, you find that at least one out of every two results is a ‘how to’: how to get more followers, how to make a profit from Twitter; or a who’s who: who has more followers, who is more popular? This only confirms the impression you get when reading tech news about Twitter: a huge part of the media coverage is about Twitter’s popularity, marketing and social capital. Searchable interest in Twitter is predominantly about marketing!

Telling the world what you’re having for lunch might be amusing for a while. But in general, Facebook is better for that—you choose your friends, and you have more control over comments and interactions.  Most active Twitter users do care about what they say. But they care more about the world (their followers) caring about what they say.

Twitter as a marketing tool is extremely advanced because it’s distributed and partially automatized (via applications). I sometimes envision of a sort of endtime’ scenario: a point where Twitter would become a place where machines tweet and retweet to other machines, where machines welcome other machines by direct messages, where there is only occasionally (if any) human attention to reprogram the way in which the machines interact and alter the content the machines endlessly send to each other.

What’s a Ponzi scheme?

Roughly: an investment scheme where the first investors get dividends, that is, they are paid back for their investment, directly from the capital of new investors. So a Ponzi scheme investment fund never generates any real revenue: it merely redistrbutes investments. To make sure that early investors have the feeling of earning money with their investment, there must always be new investors and more new investors than old ones: it’s a pyramid. Bernard Madoff recently became infamous through applying this scheme for many years until his pyramid collapsed, when too many investors wanted to have their money back.

Attention is Twitter’s capital

On a certain level of Twitter activity (and probably the one where most traffic happens), Twitter works in just this way. The capital used on Twitter is not money, but the attention of new users. Marketeers go crazy about Twitter because, especially on the internet, companies tend to associate attention—probably correctly—with potential revenue. If you pay attention to a link by clicking on it, you might also buy the product it’s promoting.

Of course, Twitter users are not investing real money, or at least, they’re not paying Twitter directly. (Even if Twitter itself still hasn’t earned a single dollar, the ecosystem around it is making money). The Securities and Exchange Commission probably won’t need to investigate Twitter’s offices after reading this post. And even if it consumes some time, and time is money, using an application to tweet doesn’t take that much time.

But Twitter is not “free,” at least from a macro point of view: the usual things sold by Twitter marketing software, “reach thousands of new customers for free” glosses over the fact that, even though Twitter lets users broadcast a message to their followers, their followers aren’t necessarily listening. And listening, in the Twitter marketing system, is an investment: an investment where dividends are not paid to the investor, but to the marketers, the people you listen to. It starts to resemble a Ponzi scheme. When dividends are paid with the money of other investors, we’re getting close to Madoff’s territory. Just…there is no “puppet-master”, like Madoff, steering investors towards the riff, like Lemmings. Twitter as a marketing device is just something that naturally evolved towards becoming a Ponzy.

The Twitter user cycle