Dare I say it??? Twitter, has jumped the shark!
I hate writing about Twitter. Yea’, I use it. Yes, it’s kinda lame when Barbara Walters big-up’s her Tweets. Maybe only eclipsed when Stephen Colbert mocks a morning host about his ‘twat’.
Despite all these signs of an event eclipsing, despite that Twitter still has not yet reached social saturation the likes of other mediums, despite all this… It has.
Like any other sensible bloke, I know what to think when a make-up clad, modelesque girl follows me so she can “compete with her friend for more followers”, it’s time to mark the medium as on it’s way out.
In the last week I had been followed by a diaper clad adult community, I kid you not. Bimbo’s seeking Twitter fame. Or, one of the ten plus other spammers making a move for the market. It’s OVER~!
Everything has an end, and a beginning, and a beginning to an end.
Unfortunately, Twitter has reached it’s climax without ever making money off the thing. Sad, it really is.
While this platform will still be used by me, and others. Really, it’s kinda gotten its blade dulled as more and more people looking to cop traffic, eyeballs and celebrity, are taking over. I kinda feel like saying, it’s over when the idiots move in. I know better, though I sorta just said that.
So, here’s to everything cool that gets ruined by the drool and drab of the mass market. I accept this, being a marketer of sorts. I accept the alpha points, the dips, and the moronic twits. I accept that Google has “partnered” with Twitter, giving vague contextual monetary relevance to this platform. I accept the constant battle to deliver tweets of relevance, or humor. I accept and embrace it all.
Just as I accepted the friend request from Tila Tequila on Myspace, I accept the spammy world being born of all those Tila Tequila’s, Jeffree Starr’s and all the other wanna be Myspace Celebrities. It’s ok though, really it is.
As many marketers, strategists and the like know. There is a beginning, middle, and an end. There’s even a beginning to the ending, an ending to the beginning and so on and so on and so on….
Oh, excuse me, I just got a @digitalsavant from tweetterwhore, gotta go!
~ Enjoi!,
@world – Brad <3’s Fonzie!
Great article! It is so frustrating how “stupid” marketing and advertising has become! Is it the “stupid” generation or what? I’m confused since common sense just doesn’t play out anymore.
Those who are seeking real information are bombarded with stupidity which then destroys any marketing trust or relevancy. Only relevant marketing will enable a return on trust and leading-edge software and technology will bring that around. Adobe’s new scene7 is an example of such a product as it links in to data and merges that data to make the messaging relevant to the receiver of that message.
But, in the mean-time there’s so much noise and screaming going on – who can you trust? All a prospect/recipient can do is find a way to stop it or block it. And that’s the beginning of the end.
Victor,
Great comment. I agree, it all becomes noise. The power is in building a strong brand, building relevance, and building trust. Boil this down to respect.
Lot’s of people talking different strategies, it’s all a semantic play on respect. Do people respect you enough to listen? Do people respect you enough to share? Do people care to care enough?
I am even playing my semantic game. Respect, Brand Culture, Lifestyle marketing, buzz word buzz word product plug…
Keep it focused, keep it honest. Like Ali G says, “Keep it Real!”
Most “beliefs,” held by the average human, most “facts,” most everything we hold dear as “truth” … is dead wrong. Humans are so so so stupid.
99% of the people I ask say that cell phones send their radio signal directly to a something orbiting the earth.
99% of the people I ask think that every message we transmit into space goes on forever and ever and ever.
99.9999999 x 10 % of everyperson on this planet will look at you like an old black Cocker Spaniel when you ask them to define: “signal to noise ratio”
Understand signal to noise ratio and you understand the human condition.
Our tiny little cell phones radiate in all directions and can barely reach a big antenna a mile away in a straight line, much less pierce the atmosphere to a transceiver in orbit. And even the strongest FM radio station on earth will be drowned out by cosmic back ground noise before it even makes it half way to the nearest star. Without focus every thing we utter is lost forever.
However, if you take a big dish and focus the signal into a tight “pattern” you can direct radio energy the way a laser focuses light. Hold a laser steady enough and you can bounce it off the moon.
The question you must ask is: “Does Twitter FOCUS our human signal?”
I say that, yes, Twitter focuses and captures our thoughts and preserves them in digital format – potentially – forever. How many of our phone conversations are recorded, stored and easily accessed? Far less than 1%. And the device that we use to converse and text to individuals can now publish a thought to – everyone.
What does this mean? Not sure. But I remember, way back in 1993, being asked how email made AOL money. “Not sure,” I said, “but you better believe that they are working on it.”
WOW.. Phil. WOW.
Phil,
You made me sit back in my seat. Been thinking about your comment, it’s better then the post. It’s brilliant.
As you said, Twitter does capture our thoughts and preserve them. It gives us an option to focus our signal, but I would disagree on it actually focusing our signal.
For Twitter to focus our signal, it must decipher the care and concern of the captured collective community. Bubbling up the thought of what most concerns us, to what is most useful for our concern.
Twitter simply gave us a simple platform to distill our thoughts into a direct and simple form. A focused form. A dose of our thought, highly concentrate.
Twitter, if you’re listening, listen to Phil. Listen to your people. Capture the collective consciousness, give us options as to what filter of focus we want to see the world through, and deliver the truth and relevance hiding within your pages.
Make money on clarity, and providing a construct for truth. Perhaps turning Twitter inward, to companies, allowing them to capture the collective and distilling its truth, is what will deliver you from the scourge is irrelevance that begets most empty mediums.
Great article.
Brad,
Excellent post! Truth is I’ve never used Twitter, mostly because I’m not cool enough to make the time to figure it out before the next craze comes along. Social Commerce is an interesting beast. The term sounds innocuous, in fact almost genuinely concerned with the well-being of society. On the one hand, information made available certainly has the potential to be empowering and staying connected with friends and family across the globe is fantastic. On the other hand there are Bimbo’s seeking Twitter fame… not the highest pursuit of humanity (though Twitter can’t be blamed for how people use the tool I suppose). The underlying principle that drives involvement in social networks is a need to feel important. Like a video game accumulating points gathering virtual friends lends itself to at least a superficial sense of importance. The commerce of Social Commerce relies on the competition for importance – a temporary band-aid to the feelings on insecurity (lack of importance) which will be torn off as soon as you see someone with something cooler: about 3.5 seconds at our pace of evolution. Social Commerce seeks to capture eyeballs to tell brains to tell fingertips to pull credit cards from wallets to pay for “things you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like” and do it again – faster. What ever happened to playing in the park with actual friends?
Phil,
Applying the signal to noise ratio to the human condition is brilliant. However, I disagree with your assessment that people are stupid (at least not all of them). I do believe we are bombarded with noise and can have difficult times making decisions. I also believe that greed and self-interest have temporarily taken over community and that ever so important yet illusive RESPECT.
People earn respect. Greed and self interest are the vital primary forces hardwired into the brain. Only after we take care of ourselves can we help others. And when we do help others we do it to improve our chances of being helped when we need it and improving the community we live in.
People are very stupid, easy to anger and full of bias. Spend some time on http://www.lesswrong.com and memorize everything on this page -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Decision-making_and_behavioral_biases
- THEN tell me how not-stupid the average human is when you realize how stupid you and I am most of the time.
How many people can even thing 3 moves ahead in a game much less life? Or 4? Heck, thinking 2 moves ahead is a serious challenge, now try it behind the wheel going 60 miles an hour and that, “asshole cuts you off!”. How many times does anyone even take the effort to imagine the immediate consequence of a single simple action?.. that is, 1 move ahead. Did you actually waste time flipping off the guy who cut you off or did you try to look and see if a running deer had caused him to swerve and you were about to crash into head full of antlers at 60 miles an hour.
How many readers of this comment string question whether you and Brad are the same person? How quickly does it take the average person to question if I am Brad is me or you are me and I am Brad or what the possibility is that the 3 of us are actually made up by a 4th very crafty person or group.
Put your ear up to 99.9% of the human skulls out there and all you will hear is static. Listen to mine and you will hear the same thing, but every now and then there will be silence. That silence is me listening.
You’re a FAILURE !!!!! It is just the beginning for twitter.
LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Ashton Kutcher has become the first member of Twitter to have over one million followers.
Surrounded by his wife, Demi Moore , Soleil Moon Frye and Sean “Diddy” Combs supporting him via phone, the star officially crossed the one million mark, beating out rival CNN Breaking News shortly after 11 PM Pacific time.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: The Latest Star Sightings
“Where’s the champagne, where’s the champagne,” Ashton said on his Ustream.TV web feed just a short while before reaching his goal. “We’ve gotta pop the cork on this folks.”
CNN, which lost by less than 1,200 followers, quickly congratulated the star.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Ashton Kutcher & Demi Moore
“Congrats @aplusk. Ashton Kutcher is the first twitter account to reach 1MM followers,” someone wrote on their Twitter account page.
The race was a tight one with only a handful of followers separating the two Tweeters as their numbers inched closer to one million on Thursday evening.
“Tell me this isn’t better than watching tv,” Ashton Tweeted on Thursday, just a few hours before he crossed the finish line. “We get to participate in the entertainment. I feel like I’m directing an episode of punk’d”
From the front page of CNN.com, no joke!
Oprah, Ashton Kutcher mark Twitter ‘turning point’
“As Ashton Kutcher becomes the first to collect 1 million followers on Twitter and Oprah Winfrey sends out her first tweet, tech observers are debating: Does Friday mark a new peak for the microblogging service? Or the beginning of its demise?”
[...] Some months back I had written an article about how Twitter had jumped the shark. In comments that came from site readers, a brilliant point came up. Twitters value would be cemented by indexing ability. One reader coined it, “the signal to noise ratio“. [...]
Awesome blog post, thanks for keeping me busy!