I’m convinced that the Twitter fad is about over. Why? Because the folks that use Twitter are trying to evolve the application beyond what makes it great and the powers behind Twitter are letting them. And, once Twitter stops being great, we’ll all leave and go to the next thing.
Let’s back up and talk oatmeal cookies for a moment. The best oatmeal cookies are somewhat healthy I suppose but, like all truly great cookies, the perfect oatmeal cookie never forgets to really be about sugary goodness. And yet hit Google and you’ll find recipe after recipe for healthy oatmeal cookies. In the end, by adding too much whole grain, apple cider, wheat germ, flax seed oil, organic dried cranberries and the like you end up just making a really disappointing health bar. Somewhere along the line, you lost what made the cookie so good in the first place.
Sometimes a cookie should just be a cookie. Twitter should just be Twitter.
This little rant stems from Twitter recently adding the ability to group the people you follow into smaller subsets or “lists”. Many 3rd party apps have allowed this for some time, but Twitter has taken it to the next level by allowing people to follow each other’s lists. An interesting idea in the short term, it has generated more buzz than I’ve heard for Twitter in some time, but I see it as a clearly forced evolutionary step that takes value away from the core Twitter experience.
In a nutshell, once you start grouping people you also start ignoring people. Not everyone you find interesting is going to be able to be neatly placed within a group. Ultimately you’ll end up with a “Miscellaneous” or “Others” list for all the people you like to follow but can’t seem to classify. How often are you really going to bother to read the Tweets of people that fall into your “Others” list? Rarely.
Too many forget that the power of Twitter isn’t in the communication with people we already know. There are dozens of other platforms that allow us to do that. The phone. Email. Commenting on personal blogs such as this one. Going to lunch. The power of Twitter is in the search. The power is the ability to find new people with new ideas that can bring new value to your life.
Let me try an example:
A well known photographer has taken the time to set up a Twitter list of his favorite photographers that he follows. It’s a solid list of about 50 top tier photographers and a few up-and-coming talents in the field that grows and shrinks as he sees fit.
I like photography. I subscribe to his list. I enjoy the Tweets that I receive. But, I’m now no longer using the real power of Twitter. How so? Because this list is where I look for Tweets about photography while elsewhere, outside of this list, thousands of other people are also posting interesting Tweets about photography. Myself included. Yet, because I’m not on this respected photographers well followed list of 50 fellow photographers, my Tweets and the thousands of other Tweets go unread as we all get lazy and let others tell us who to follow and let them lead the conversation.
What made Twitter great was when we were, in the beginning, just one large community. Now we’re being broken back up into exclusive groups thanks to these lists. Unless you become part of the primary lists in your space being generated by the top influencers on Twitter you’ll increasingly fade away as a participant. You’ll become just part of the background noise of “followers”, rarely if ever read, and thus become a much smaller part of the conversation.
Bottom line: Now that Twitter is breaking down into social cliques, the value of trying to participate is fading. Most of us are going to need to find a new cookie.
