Could Twitter be "MySpaced"?

http://www.markevanstech.com/2011/04/16/could-twitter-get-myspaced/

by buckpost • 15 years ago

38 28 15 years ago

Could Twitter be supplanted by something new and different? It would be a huge challenge but it's possible.

chuhnk• 15 years ago

It took me 4 years to realize the benefits of twitter beyond self absorbed social micro blogging. Its a real communication platform which allows you to interact with people around the world. For example the first thing that brought me to twitter was real time updates on a ruby conference. Where else was I going to get that? I can get information before its been posted as news. The great thing about it is respected figures in almost all communities are participating. In a few words they can let us in on what they are working on or take the time to answer questions. If you have a problem you can throw it out there on some hashtag and hope one in a million will respond and usually they will. Its completely changed communication and I cant see it dying.

However I believe the micro blogging platform should be treated like email. An open messaging system that can be adopted by anyone and defines an underlying protocol so that we can send messages between all micro blogging sites. I have a gmail account, do I really want to create a hotmail account to email someone with a hotmail domain? If I have a twitter account and someone has an rstat.us account then perhaps I want to message them.

I think anyone who did decides to take on the task of turning micro blogging into an open messaging platform would need to look beyond just integrating sign ons. Think of smtp.

edit: I missed this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMicroBlogging

raquo3• 15 years ago

What I don't like in twitter is how non-obvious and inconvenient it is.

E.g. the only way to communicate with someone without polluting your timeline (because who really cares what you @replied to someone) is DMing them, and even that is less convenient than even facebook messages. But no one uses DMs for most conversations so I have to go without following some awesome people just because they @reply massively and I have scroll fatigue already.

Another example – twitter's website has no new @mention notifications, and my SO accidentally discovered this feature when she downloaded Tweetie months after she started tweeting.

No wonder twitter's user retention rate sucks.

ugh2• 15 years ago

But @replies don’t show up in your timeline unless you are following both sides of the exchange, right?

mkr-hn• 15 years ago

Correct. And I've never found those exchanges disruptive. I also limit the number of people I follow. Possibly related. :)

raquo3• 15 years ago

Does not seem right. See http://twitter.com/#!/shauninman for example

I see a lot of Shaun's tweets starting with @someuser, e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/shauninman/status/59266889741905920 http://twitter.com/#!/shauninman/status/59254473125666816 http://twitter.com/#!/shauninman/status/59237467353657344 http://twitter.com/#!/shauninman/status/58999188649807872 and I don't follow him or any of these guys

justinxreese• 15 years ago

There is a mentions section that lists all of your replies. And you can have any mentions text messaged to your phone.

cmelbye• 15 years ago

If you send a mention to someone, no one will see it in the timeline except for the person who you addressed it to, and people who follow both you and that person (If that makes sense.) You're generally not going to annoy your followers by sending out @mentions.

Humourisok• 15 years ago

If new services will suggest open TOS with clear promise to keep them as is, they have good chance. Developers.

6ren2• 15 years ago

> social media users are fickle, disloyal at the drop of a hat

I don't know about this.

Firstly, I would have thought search users would be fickle; but people stick to Google: familiarity is a huge factor for mainstream consumer franchises (Buffett goes on about Coke, Wrigly Chewing Gum etc) as opposed to early-adopter tech folk; Google goes to enormous lengths for good PR and visibility (mainly by actually doing good, which is nice); despite complaints, Google does its job (relevant results; very fast), and keeps improving. If a commodity like search can be sticky, why not social media?

Secondly, a social networking service is intrinsically harder for users to change, because you are connected to other people. Of course, it has to do its basic job well; you have to keep improving it; you need good PR. In other words, it's your game to lose.

I'm not sure why MySpace failed, but I think part of it was targeting teens/young people (who like change, both in adopting the new and in then discarding it), e.g. via bands, which is also hit/fad oriented. I think facebook's uni students are less dangerous in this sense, because they more often want to keep in contact after graduating (compared with teenagers), and facebook have worked hard to grow out of that dangerously fashionable zone anyway.

warning: this post contains guesses.

minalecs• 15 years ago

i think that utility is different from social. Search is a utility that competitors have offered incremental improvements, that while useful.. to most people don't matter. Example: how many people test search results in multiple engines, to determine which one is giving better results ?. At this time, on any search engine, if you can find what you're looking for most of the time, in the first few results, you just stick with it.

Where as social is just that its whats cool/hip and something your friends are using. I think you underestimate the value of virility. Services like Instagram and Tumblr, are all very good services that are social and could possibly unseat what we see now. People and not just in the tech circle are always trying out new cool/hip social services. If some users think its cool, convince their friends to join and the cycle starts over.

6ren2• 15 years ago

> I think you underestimate the value of virility.

Maybe. I think it varies with age group, as I was saying. I think people in their teen's and 20's are more interested in what's cool/hip. Certainly, for social services in that teen/20's demographic, I think you're right.

Older people, people with spouses, people with young children, people with mortgages, people with established careers and groups of friends and clubs and routines. Well, I think maybe the value of virility is less there. I'm not saying it's a good thing.

atacrawl• 15 years ago

The difference between Twitter and MySpace is that MySpace was a colossal piece of shit. It was ugly, poorly built, and most importantly, lacked the timeline feature that best illustrates what a social networking site is supposed to do -- keep you informed on what your friends are doing.

Twitter is already boiled down to its essence.

fooandbarify2• 15 years ago

Sure. Facebook could be "MySpaced", too. The whole point of what happened to MySpace is that it was hard to figure out what it would take to disrupt them until it happened.

noahc2• 15 years ago

It's hard to know what will disrupt them. But, it seems there is a formula.

1. Pick a niche (college kids)

2. Build what they want

3. Let it trickle down (high school) or up (grandma) or out (businesses) to gain mass.

So while we can't pick the winner, we know what the winner is going to do.

fooandbarify2• 15 years ago

While that approach obviously worked for Facebook, I think this is one of those areas where it's hard to pin down a "formula" that will work in every case without eventually having it be proven wrong in a big way. In this case, for example, it is conceivable (although maybe unlikely) that another major player such as Google or Facebook could disrupt Twitter by starting big. In other words, rather than targeting a niche until they gain mass, they could somehow leverage their existing mass to get ahead.

mtkd• 15 years ago

There is certainly a dynamic with social sites that the 'next generation' want to use something new - just like with music genres - you can't be cool indefinitely.

The next generation may reject social altogether - and not want to be tracked and recorded 24/7.

keiferski• 15 years ago

This is definitely an underemphasized point. It could turn out like the radical 60s and subsequent conservative backlash of the 80s.

It will eventually get old, either from a quick death (rejection of social altogether) or a slow death (commodification; Facebook/social media becoming a platform, like email).

rwmj• 15 years ago

Except "60s" -> "80s" in around 6 months instead of 20 years.

nikcub• 15 years ago

"be bloggered" would be more approp

MenaMena123• 15 years ago

I think Twitter could just be a management problem and can be easily fixed. MySpace was poor management and a poor website, Twitter is actual cool. You can talk about how Twitter shuts off alot and can be created better, but in reality normal users dont care what you created it with, if it looks cool and works most of the time, its good to go.

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

I have a continual internal struggle between two competing thoughts:

1) Internet social media is a young, rapidly evolving ecosystem, heading towards better understanding of consumers, better solutions, and longer product lifetimes.

2) Internet social media is basically entertainment, where sites, platforms, and communication strategies rise and fall in popularity like yesterday's television shows and networks, but on a much, much shorter timeline.

aneth• 15 years ago

Twitter is a seriously rough and immature tool. It has no ability to intelligently handle identity or content types. It's confusing to many people, and generally has a style that will quickly appear dated once a well designed alternative gains critical mass.

A few years ago, the micro-blogging community was not big enough for a second player. Now it is, and Twitter will change or be overtaken by a more compelling alternative.

The simplicity of Twitter was once its strength, but like any technology, it must grow to meet the demands of its users. Facebook added chat, photos, a compelling platform, etc... Twitter is dead in the water right now.

Who wants to remember silly @handles? There isn't even a directory of official Twitter handles for companies.

Private group message applications are sprouting up everywhere - Twitter is just plodding along unaware that this is a huge need.

Who wants to see hideous bit.ly links instead of actual content?

Is 140 characters really the future? I doubt it.

Are third party services really necessary to embed media? Do users really need to figure out how to tape together 10 different services and clients to get a good experience?

Twitter needs to grow up, or it will die. And it will happen quickly - less than two years from the day a serious competitor gains steam.

wyclif• 15 years ago

Has anyone else noticed, in the recent spate of HN submissions on choosing company names and the matching domain name for startups that founders are saying things like, "check to see if the name is available on Twitter; if not you'll need to choose again."

That's amusing, but unacceptable given the large amount of squatting on Twitter. Anyone here have any luck getting a company name from Twitter when it was squatted?

Could Twitter be "MySpaced"?

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