All that twitters
It’s time you got with the programme and starting using Twitter. It’s a type of e-network of chat fragments, writes Richard Delevan.
A little over a year ago, I badly dented my cutting-edge cred by admitting ignorance when confronted by an eager techie acquaintance who, bursting with enthusiasm, asked, are you on Twitter?” This being one of those awkward, increasingly rare, physical-world real-time conversations, there was no way to cheat and Google the word. Was this a new drug I was meant to have tried or some bit of kit? From the dilation of my friend’s pupils, I wasn’t sure.
So I had to go with looking a bit like John McCain when confronted with this sort question. Confused, a bit weary, with a healthy dollop of scepticism.
He explained that Twitter was a “microblogging” social appliance that allows people to lifeblog, using messages of no greater than 140 characters in length. I think I managed to stutter, “so what do people, erm, use it for?” Well, twittering that you’re awake, for starters. That you’ve burned the toast. That the guy next to you on the bus is talking to himself.
“And who’s reading this?” I asked. My friend explained that he had more than 250 people “following” him, that is subscribing to receive these tiny slice-of-life updates.
I must have looked stunned, because my friend started talking faster, perhaps mistaking horror for joy. Sounding even more like the 10,000-year-old man, I stopped him and said that sounded like a whole level of hell that no sane person would want in their life.
I was wrong. On a lot of counts. I’ve been blogging for a little over three years at this point. People thought it a bit odd back then - some still do. But blogging, particularly when you consider that everybody with a page on Facebook or Bebo is in some respect doing the same thing, is now entirely mainstream. It wasn’t such a stretch to make it go.
I started using Twitter just after I began working out of a one-man office a few months ago. Having had a look at the number of people I knew who were using it, I thought there must be something to it.
After a few weeks, it reminded me of being back at a particularly enjoyable job in a big office building in Manhattan 10 years ago. We worked in cubes that gave you some privacy but didn’t go all the way to the ceiling. This led to a behaviour known as “gophering”, where you’d stick your head above the cube walls to see who else was about. Everyone was working on different accounts, so there was a constant variety of topics filling chatter about work, but even more of the airtime was taken up with a running commentary on existence. “I spilled my coffee.” “I’m still hungover from the weekend.” “My computer has the blue screen of death.” These provided distraction. But occasionally you would, by listening, stumble upon a new idea for your own work.
Twitter is just that. The pleasant background noise of serendipitous conversations in a really good office environment. And, as we increasingly work in fragmented teams, working from the field or another office or at home, a Twitter- shaped hole was forming in our work lives.
And when Twitter and its lesser-known competitors rushed to fill that hole, it turned out a lot of people were waiting for exactly what was on offer. So many, in fact, that the tiny start-up has had trouble keeping up. Traffic on its web servers is 500% what it was 12 months ago, and for many loyal users the first half of 2008 was a struggle. When the company’s service was down - which seemed like every couple of days - the homepage displayed a cartoon of a whale. The whale itself has become a sort of internet nanocelebrity and shorthand for an overburdened system.
But that hasn’t stopped the users from coming, sending their “tweets” from mobile phones, instant message platforms and purpose-built programmes sitting on PC desktops. Venture capitalists are believers as well. In June, the company attracted some $ 15m in funding from investors including Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.
And now the company is fighting off something it didn’t imagine it would yet have to deal with – spam. Unscrupulous businesses selling unmentionable products, filling in-boxes with invitations to click on a link that would take you to their e-commerce site. Twitter is cracking down on this, it announced last week, but the speed with which spammers have leapt to understand and exploit the fast-growing medium is in a perverse way a testament to its success. The spammers wouldn’t bother if they didn’t see an audience there.
There is a lingering problem, however, which I asked about in my third question to my early-bird Twitter friend a year ago: how does it make money? The answer is, it doesn’t yet, and it has no strategy for doing so. The lack of a business model has led some to worry that the lean, mean ethics of Web 2.0 are giving way to the “build it and they will come” delusions of the late 1990s, where a nice PowerPoint could get you €10m from a venture capital firm desperate for dotcom success.
What makes it different, the company’s defenders insist, is that this is building a real audience and community that is getting value from this product. They’d rather burn cash for a while and let the audience build, before imposing a way to collect revenues that winds up alienating Twitter’s user base.
We’ll see. But even if it is true that there are a worrying number of start-ups deluding themselves into thinking that revenues aren’t all that important, Twitter seems to be an exception.
Published in: Business & Finance, 1st August 2008