Bigger is not better. Simple is better. And then of course, better is better.
Rob Diana on the Regular Geek expounds on these statements. He uses Twitter’s explosive popularity as an example, calling his post “Simple is the new black”.
But the other buzz that’s been going around the blogosphere is user loyalty or “retention”. Apparently, Twitter’s retention rates are abysmal. This means that, while it’s easy to try out, not many people are finding ongoing value in the service.
My strong belief is that the folks who try it once or twice are simply not seeing the real value of the service. But that may well be Twitter’s fault. Sure it’s easy to answer the question “What are you doing?”. But the minutiae of everyday life (your mundane doings) are not really what long term users of Twitter want to know about — although that may not be so true for the celebrities who are now joining. Some star-gazers might think it cool to see Oprah Winfrey or Ashton Kutcher tweet: “Eating a bagel. Poppy seed stuck in teeth.”
The real value of Twitter, apart from its simplicity, is the new and interesting information it can quickly convey. The “tweet” stream you get from Twitter is like a radio station of good stuff (because you pick who you want to listen to and you can dump the uninteresting people easily). It’s an endless barrage of short (140 character maximum) microblogged items. But it is also searchable, so you can “rewind” this radio station and find topics you’re specifically interested in.
For more views on what Twitter is all about, check out these blog posts:
- What you need to know about Twitter by Darryl Halse
- Twitter Author Guidelines by Karel Vredenburg
- The Twitter Approval Matrix