I am going to suggest something that, depending on your attachment to Twitter, you might find controversial, or at least mildly vexing. Despite high awareness, Twitter has not crossed the chasm from early adopters to the early majority, and unless some yeomanlike efforts are made to change course, history says it never will. History also tells us that technology products and services that don’t cross that chasm simply go away, because early adopters move on. Face it, when you have the founder of the heavily Twitter-inspired 140 Characters Conference suggesting that location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla are already becoming more relevant than Twitter for some, you know the Twitterati are already getting restless.
The majority of online Americans have their status-updating and connection needs met by Facebook. That is what it is. Whatever separates Twitter from Facebook has yet to be articulated in the minds of mainstream Americans. Some of you reading this may be able to passionately elaborate on those differences, but the undeniable truth is that many of those differences have not been positioned as important or meaningful to the greater online public. For most Americans, Facebook is not a marketing platform, or a way to interact with brands, or a way to otherwise “promote” their interests. The basic use-case for Facebook is simply to reconnect or maintain connections with people they already know. That may or may not be why you use Facebook, but it’s certainly why that big ole’ bulge at the top of the bell curve does.
Twitter needs to find similar use-cases, and more meaningful tools to demonstrate its value to the folks in the middle of the adoption curve. There’s no better place to start than with the tools being developed around Twitter’s platform. Next month, a host of Twitter developers are gathering at Chirp, the company’s first “official” conference. As someone who has spent his career researching and monitoring the media and technology consumption trends of everyday Americans, I’d like to offer those developers some unsolicited advice that represents that vast middle of the bell curve heretofore underserved by Twitter:
Stop making tools that allow users to schedule Tweets to broadcast messages around the clock. Stop making tools to measure “sentiment” on Twitter. Stop making tools to mass follow or mass unfollow other users. Most people don’t need these, because most people aren’t “broadcasters.” Most people aren’t marketers, either, but there sure are lots of tools built on Twitter for marketers to market to other marketers. Stop making tools for social media enthusiasts–and start making tools that make real peoples’ lives easier or better. Make the tools that will get your “less hip” older sister, or your sort-of-cool uncle interested in Twitter. Find ways to articulate the genuine value of OAuth without using the words “protocol” or “extension.”
More people read and send SMS messages than use any single social networking web site. Tap into that.
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“History also tells us that technology products and services that don’t cross that chasm simply go away, because early adopters move on.”
This certainly applies to technology products, but I’m not sure it does in *quite* the same way to web services. I can’t offhand think of too many web services where a failure to cross the chasm has meant rapid decline – Friendster maybe? MySpace looks likely to go down in history as the great failure of this era of the social web, and it CERTAINLY crossed over. On the other hand, blogging as an activity never crossed the chasm, and I’ve never been convinced by any of the ‘death of blogs’ posts I’ve seen – it looks set to remain a potent minority activity.
It strikes me that Twitter’s main problem isn’t Foursquare, it’s Facebook: or rather it’s the expectations created by Facebook’s success – that a social web service ought to be a universal rather than a niche product, even a wide niche product. Of course the people behind Twitter haven’t exactly worked to downplay these expectations! But Twitter may simply have found its natural level – the kind of intense microblogging it encourages, like full on blogging, will be useful to a limited number. That’s disappointing for people who expected it to take over the world, but it means its relationship with the top of the bell curve is a little different. I completely agree Twitter needs to be clearer about its benefits but I’m not convinced it ought to be chasing after an audience that it’ll probably never reach. And actually, from Ev Williams’ recent “information network not social network” positioning I wonder if they’re not starting to accept this too.
If Facebook allows Twitter-style news feeds of mainstream news and following recommendations of people who aren’t your friends, then it will have adopted the best features of Twitter IMO.
I waited for some time before posting this particular thought, Tom, until I had solid evidence–data–that the bloom was off the Twitter rose. I can think of a gazillion examples where an inability to cross the chasm for web services has led to fairly rapid failure–Myspace is not a good example of this because it DID cross the chasm and thus built up such a large user base that its decline is bound to be gradual. Myspace isn’t in trouble because it became mainstream, it’s in trouble because it failed to innovate.
But Twitter has nowhere near the “installed” base that Myspace does, even today. If the relatively small base that Twitter has begins to cleave off into other location/microblogging apps, there is no MySpace or AOL-sized userbase to use as cushion.
But, you make an excellent point about the expectations around Twitter–maybe it is destined to be a niche product, and that ain’t all bad. Rolex, BMW and even Apple succeed quite nicely occupying those under 10% niches. I guess my point addressed those expectations more than anything. But, in lieu of revenue, it is those expectations that keep the servers on and the salaries paid at Twitter HQ.
Totally agree about the servers and salaries – if Twitter is a natural niche product it may have overreached itself already. I think the “crossing the chasm” thing is partly a case of locating the chasm – a lot of web services crash because they don’t even get to the early adopters (using the innovators -> early adopters -> early majority -> etc. diffusion model). Twitter’s position on the very lip of the chasm – a Top 50 site but not Top 10 – is a little more unusual, though.
Good post, and a good point from Tom as well. I largely agree with the sentiment of “Stop making tools for social media enthusiasts–and start making tools that make real peoples’ lives easier or better” but is the former not a way of finding a sustainable business model as it is pandering to the already-converted-but-willing-to-jump-ship-to-the-next-shiny-thing?
(I’m also presuming your data includes 3rd party apps/services, and not just twitter.com)