Leo, please rename TWiT to “This Week in Twitter”!
I’m starting to loose interest in one of my favorite podcasts: “This Week in Tech” (aka TWiT) hosted by Leo Laporte. Recently this podcast changed it’s focus from reporting about news in technology to covering the latest gossip on Twitter. Myself being a person that is absent on Twitter and keeps low profile on other social networks like Facebook or Facebook’s german clone StudiVZ, I cannot relate at all the stories. Besides some of the are not related to what I’d call “tech” at all. While I can accept that some of the discussions on TWiT are from an American perspective (like the ones about Netflix or other services only available in the US), they are at least related to Tech and thus interesting to me, even if not directly applicable to my daily life (thanks to Wil Harris by the way for being TWiT’s European voice). It’s getting more difficult for me to follow the discussion about what the ex-TechTV crew is now up to, please use Twitter or LinkedIn for that; still it’s somewhat interesting to get insight into the media industry. But beyond that? Covering the twitter gossip is way beyond my circle of interest.
But, since even Cranky Geek and Master of all Things Tech John C. Dvorak does now chirp, tweet and twitter, which is - as somebody phrased it in one of the latest TWiTs - like a white guy using Hip-Hop terms; when that happens, you know that they are not fresh any longer. I guess it’s time for me to ask myself some questions, and eventually also find an answer: Why wasn’t I affected by the Twitter virus yet? What is the value of Twitter? Shall I join it?
Why wasn’t I affected by the Twitter virus yet?
First of all, I didn’t get the point of twitter (yet), and apparently, I am not alone. Beside the inability of myself to grasp the value of twitter, the fact that I’m not tweeting might also have a geographical, cultural or personal reason. I’m living in Germany. Hypes like Twitter usually start in the States and take off later here, eventually. On the other hand I regard myself as generally interested in tech and work in the IT industry. But I’m not in the Web 2.0 inner circle and it seems to me that Twitter is at large a symptom of the “social media/ Web 2.0 folks“.
What is the value of twitter?
To discover the value of it, I researched some blogs and the first astonishing and new thing for me to find out, is that apparently (according to Mike Butcher) Twitter is based on the Short Message Service (SMS) that so well known in mobile phones. Why don’t they say so on the Twitter Homepage? I wonder how they generate the money for the millions of short messages, they are assumingly sending out. Even when considering that Twitter is paying much less for each message than I am (€0,19/message, which is ridiculous), this is still a vast amount of money. John C. Dvorak predicts that at some point the collected data is sold to Google or to a “market research firm where it will be analyzed for the purposes of improving advertising response rates” - eventually this is really what might happen. I see no other way to monetize what they are doing.
Viewing Twitter as a mobile message broadcasting service start to make sense to me. Keith Casey, Johnnie Moore, Paul Bradshaw, Anthony LaFauce, Maddie Grant, Peter Kim, and Chris Brogan (also on lifehack) blogged about the value of Twitter and identified the following:
- Twitter is an ongoing chronicle of what you think and do that someone might find interesting.
- Twitter serves as a virtual water cooler for people working in virtual teams.
- Twitter exposes more surface area of yourself for others to connect with.
- Twitter can promote your blog by sending out new blog posts.
- Twitter publishes to mobile devices.
- Twitter helps you to follow conferences, either as a participant or from a distance.
- Twitter is noisy.
- Twitter feeds your thoughts and ideas by providing pseudo-random input from people you follow.
- Twitter is faster than blogs or other media.
- Twitter provides for quick answers from your friends.
- Twitter is a great place to find folks to help with things.
- Twitter is *like* using del.icio.us to share, but it’s instant.
This is an impressive list at first sight. Now that I think about it, it’s similar to what we used a Skype group chat for in a virtual team at work. Discuss things that are not worth an email, but needs to be discussed anyway. Adding the direct link to a mobile phone now really sounds like a great idea to me. Except for the risk that my mobile constanctly rings and beeps, but I read you can mute people on Twitter, which looks like a good thing.
Dave Winer even compared the usefulness of Twitter to that of a mobile phone, and who could live without his or hew beloved mobile nowadays? For Chris Brogan it’s the next thing after email and blogs. If you extrapolate from there, the next thing can only be a constant live conversation, to which you can blend our friends in and out.
Shall I join it?
Enough of analysis. Shall I join Twitter or not? (And who would ever write such a long post just to discuss the point of twitter and if it is over covered on TWiT). It’s not too late yet to join the network, as it was apparently suffering from child diseases earlier. On the other hand I have heard how time consuming and addictive it is. I hear Leo’s head in my voice saying that he just cannot turn it off. Since I already need 30+ hours in each day, that’s a threat to my work/life balance. If I join Twitter I should definitely uninstall the Stumble Upon Toolbar.
I think I’ll give it a try and will report back how it worked. Let’s close with a web comic from The PC Weenies, that I could only find in Alec Weston’s Blog:
