Diary of an Online Marketer

So its 2009 and there is no denying the popularity of Twitter anymore. Being an online marketer, I of course have joined up, researched companies that have successfully applied it to their business, and looked into a variety of desktop applications to manage tweets.

But every time I log on and browse through my list of subscribed tweets, I cannot help but feel like social media has taken a huge step backwards. Why are people “moving” from facebook to this? What twitter has essentially done is taken the “facebook status”, implemented a ridiculous character limit, removed the ability to post full-text links, removed the ability to directly comment on a post, removed 95% of the information on a poster’s personal profile, removed picture albums, removed the distinction between companies and actual people, and removed 3rd party applications.

I know some people point towards the fact that its much easier to tweet with your mobile phone than a update a facebook status. Ok, they have a point there, except for the fact that nobody wants to hear about useless, mundane observations about every-day activities. This aspect reminds me of the Live Journal craze, and we all know where Live Journal’s market share is right now.

I could go on about Twitter in-depth all day, but in order to avoid writing a novel here I’m going to make a concise list of the top 3 reasons it bothers me.

• Anonymity - Some people see this as an advantage, and rightfully so. Celebrities, Corporations, Iranian dissidents… they probably benefit from not revealing very much personal information, but do you know who benefits the most? Spammers. The limited profiles of Twitter users make it easy to set up an account, and since there is no individual/corporate distinction on Twitter, spammers don’t get banned! Combine that with the fact that links are posted as bit.ly text you have no idea what you are clicking on! Good stuff.

• Non-Originality - The majority of avid Tweeters spend 90% of their time re-tweeting other posts and/or posting links to their blog posts. If we want interesting content we’ll use a real internet aggregator like Digg or Delicious, and if we wanted to read your blog, we probably would have RSS’ed it already.

• Lack of… well… Lack of Everything - I covered this in the few paragraphs above: there is nothing on the site other than 120 character posts. I don’t know why people are under the illusion that Twitter has staying power when they have the most 1-dimensional, easy-to-imitate product in the entire world. Just wait till Twitter starts hosting paid advertisements, and watch how fast people stop using it.

I know what I’m going to do… I’m going to take YouTube, impose a 15 second limit to videos and then remove the ability to post comments on the video’s page or the user’s channel, then remove all useful information from users’ profile pages. I’ll call it Clipper, and market it with the ability to upload straight from your camera phone. If everything goes to plan, I’ll be selling the rights to Google in no time.

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