Crastinate

I was discussing the value of Twitter with a friend of mine this past week. He was making the case that Twitter will be the next big communication tool in the near future for life updates (what you’re up to right now). Currently, looking at my friends’ Facebook statuses and photos is how I stay abreast of what people are up to. This friend of mine was making the case that Twitter is only in its infancy and that it will replace Facebook statuses as the preferred method of this type of communication. Well, Twitter fans, I think Twitter is great but has one major flaw that won’t allow it to go mainstream. It’s just a communication tool and communication tools evolve to become open standards. These open standards allow anyone to compete on the communication side. Let me explain with a bit of internet history.

Prodigy was my first introduction to an online community. I used to post questions about Space Quest on Prodigy game forums and get answers from other Prodigy users on what code the time machine needed to get back to the future. It was amazing. I was also able to message other users directly. For example, I could send a message to my brother’s account (FNHK96B) from my account (FNHK96C). This was, in a sense, email. The user base was limited to Prodigy users, but I could still email any of them as many times as I wanted.

Then AOL came around and blew Prodigy out of the water. AOL gave the option to email anyone, anywhere, as long as they had an email address. Email was suddenly open. So if email was open, what was AOL’s competitive advantage? Some may say that it was their ease-of-use but the real killer app was AOL Instant Messenger. You had to be on AOL to chat with other AOLers. EVERYONE used AIM back then. There was no alternative. Eventually Microsoft and Yahoo came out with their own chat programs. AOL had to open up their chat to outsiders via a downloadable AIM program. Now, any program can chat to AIM users. Chat is open. No matter how many people use AIM, AOL lost its competitive advantage.

Jump ahead to the present. Twitter is the hot program to use for short mass communication. The interesting thing is, it’s already open. Any program can post to twitter and and receive tweets. So what is Twitter’s competitive advantage? People might use it, but why would people visit the site (which Twitter would need to make money)?

So here are the final thoughts of this  long post (sorry about that). Twittering, micro-blogging snippets about your life, is awesome. Twitter, however, is a delivery service. Nothing more. There is no other advantage to using Twitter and therefore, Twitter will become one of the many message delivery services in the future. Facebook, however, has lots to offer. It’s a social network. People will always have a reason to visit the site and because of that, the Facebook status will survive while Twitter will eventually fall. We’re already seeing people migrate to Plurk and FriendFeed (which are both more robust, and in my opinion, better than Twitter). You could love Twitter, but be realistic. Twitter is not all it’s hyped up to be.

Ely Rosenstock