The Trouble With Twitter

It's time to take a look at Twitter's failings for a change.

I was linked to an article from the Harvard Business Review blog yesterday that’s about a year old, but which argues that the New York Times Company should acquire Twitter to gain a shot in the arm. The article is nearly a year old, but it’s still relevant today since the NYT is struggling and Twitter seems to be mentioned all over the place.

I’ve talked about some of the virtues of Twitter here on this blog, but I think it’s time to present the other side of the argument. You see, I’ve been researching Twitter off and on for about a year now, trying to figure out if there are any opportunities with it for the research industry and for marketers in general. And in doing so, I’ve noticed a few things that are problematic for Twitter.

Twitter is too hard for most people to use properly. Twitter itself is very easy — you log in, post your 140-character message, and submit it. But that’s not how Twitter really “works”. Follow a few experienced Twitter users and you’ll find abbreviations, retweets, short URLs and those pesky @ messages, all of which are baffling to the uninitiated.

The problem is that the alternative and current standard for social networks, Facebook, is very easy to use. You can post up a much longer update, link articles or videos independently of your message, tag your friends, and, best of all, comment on other users’ posts in an easy-to-read thread that takes place immediately below the comment.

Twitter.com is sort of a mess. To get the most out of Twitter, you really need to use a Smartphone and a third party Twitter client like Tweetdeck. The site itself is slow, goes down often, and isn’t very easy to navigate. Feeds can be very difficult to read, the “lists” don’t make a lot of sense to casual users, and it’s very easy for messages you want to read to go unnoticed because one of the people you’re following is spamming your feed with messages from a video game or too-frequent updates.

In this realm, Facebook is not much better, but Facebook does offer a few important features. The first is the ability to hide certain types of content (such as notifications from applications like Farmville) without hiding the user him or herself. The next is the ability of Facebook to lump similar posts together when they are not relevant to your interests. A third is Facebook’s ability to distinguish between mobile updates and PC updates — which tells you if someone is updating from a PC (and thus available for chat or email) or if you need to give them a call because they’re on the road. There are other features as well, but these are some of the many that Twitter needs to catch up on before it will be useful to a broad spectrum of users.

Twitter is a fairly mundane experience for the average user. The most compelling arguments I’ve heard for using Twitter are to stay on the cutting edge of news and to follow celebrities or media personalities. That’s it. Personal messages really don’t mean much unless they’re newsworthy or interesting, and for many Twitter users, that means it’s better to follow than to update. This probably explains why half of all Twitter users sign up for accounts and then don’t use the service for anything more than following. (The median number of posts per user, according to an HBR study, is 1 post every 74 days.)

The other problem, of course, is that users no longer NEED to follow celebrity tweets and news tweets because the bloggers and aggregators pick them up so quickly. Often, when news makes its way around Twitter, it’s in the form of retweets, and unless you’re in an emergency situation where any news is helpful, those retweets can be a burden to sort through and make sense of. There have been situations where Twitter has been used to help people out of trouble or to draw attention to breaking news, but a simple phone call to someone sitting at a computer or an email from a smartphone often could have a similar effect.

Twitter is down a lot. This is one of the reasons I only use Twitter to fill a sidebar news feed — it’s not a reliable means of talking to people. It’s nice that Twitter feeds can be integrated with so many services, but if Twitter weren’t around, other software would fill the void.

Twitter forces you into a mold. This has always been my chief objection about using Twitter — you are literally forced to say something in few words, or not at all. This means you either have to save something superficial or pithy or that you wind up using all sorts of tricks to abbreviate your messages. Since the network is trying to force you towards saying what you are doing right now, it actually restricts you from sharing real information without linking to an external site.

I resent being told I can only use a social network in one way, and I also resent having to do a lot of extra work to make the social network do what I want when there are other free social networks out there, like Facebook and Google Buzz, that are so much less restrictive.

So, there you have it. Twitter isn’t bad, but it certainly has some problems that can only be addressed by changing the very nature of the service. What are your thoughts?