So, Facebook is going to allow users to post tweets from their Facebook pages. While some express alarm or suggest it’s another in Facebook’s attempts to kill Twitter, I wonder. It seems like Facebook is beginning to accept that Twitter is here to stay. Or maybe, they’ve begun to realize what I have: Twitter’s future probably isn’t as a social networking site.
One of the first studies I did when I started this blog was to look at Twitter’s demographics and compare them with those of other social networks (like Facebook) and social bookmarking sites (like Digg). The results were interesting. Twitter shared characteristics of both, but leaned more toward the social bookmarking demographics.
Twitter for socializing?
I believe that Twitter will continue to be a way to communicate and socialize with others for a certain percentage of users. Or, I should perhaps say, that for a certain percentage of users, a certain percentage of their tweets will be of a social nature. But even for these folks, I’m not sure that it will be done through the Twitter UI.
About 50% of Twitter users currently tweet through a client or site other than Twitter.com. Twitter’s usability has lagged behind those clients. They are obviously trying to beef up their interface, probably in part to make it easier to socialize. They’re introducing a new RT UI, and I’ll bet they do an improved Reply UI and add grouping features.
It’s a fine line, though. Part of the attraction of Twitter to many users is its streamlined nature: both the 140 character limit, and the lean interface. Adding features without complicating the interface is tricky, and Twitter could lose some of its charm and some of its users if it adds too much or doesn’t do the job well.
It’s About Mining the Twitter Stream
But while Twitter will be used for socializing to some extent, I think its future isn’t really as a social network, per se. Twitter’s made its mark because it provides such great, real-time information. Instead of thinking of Twitter as a social network–a website for socializing, I’m thinking of it more and more as a platform and a service—a rich database that is being constantly, and I mean every second, updated. Twitter is an information source. And when you’re talking about an information source, a service, a database, what’s important is your ability to mine it and extract relevant data.
From that perspective, Facebook feeding Twitter is a good thing. It’s a GREAT thing. 250 million more users to provide data that can be mined.
On the social side, I think that users will want tools that mine Twitter for the social tweets and deliver them to whatever place and in whatever way they want. I want to communicate with various people on Twitter, so of course I want to see their tweets. That doesn’t necessarily mean I want or need to see them in Twitter. I just don’t want to miss them and I don’t want them to miss my tweets, either. If I see and post tweets through FB or email or IM, who cares. To me, Twitter is just as service I’m using to pull and post. (Well, Twitter may care if it can’t serve ads or otherwise find a way to make money with that model.)
It’s a similar story on the information side. If I’m interested in a given topic, I want to be able to mine the stream for information about it, and leverage the real-time nature of the stream to get the latest information about that topic. I want to take advantage of the incredibly rich number of sources and experts on Twitter, as well as the communities that have built up around topics.
But that doesn’t mean I want to sit on Twitter and work at the stream to get that information. (I already spend WAY too much time on Twitter. It may be hard to believe for you twitter addicts, but most people can’t or won’t spend that much time checking tweets and tweeting them.)
I want the information brought to me. I want to be able to easily mine the stream and set up automated ways to get the best information on a topic and in a timely fashion. (Think TweetMeMe.)
Those Clever Guys at Google
Twitter’s stream is a data source, a very powerful one. The internet, too, is a data source. The clever guys at Google figured that out and provided us with a powerful data mining tool, called Search. Now, we can mine the internet “database” much more easily. With things like Google Alerts and Google Wave, we can do so less effortlessly and have the information delivered to us via email, rather than having to proactively seek it.
Twitter is right to focus some effort on its UI, because users hear about Twitter and go to Twitter.com to test the waters. The barrier to entry has to be low enough to retain them. Twitter is also right to beef up its search capabilities. Allowing users to find information in the stream is key to providing the value that will retain new users and grow the user base.
But I think Twitter would be smart to think of themselves more as a platform or service, and think about how to enable others to leverage their data. I don’t think Twitter should try to compete primarily as a social network. Instead of positioning itself as the go-to site, it should position itself as the indispensable middleman without which business cannot be done. Decentralization, with multiple streams, is a disservice and can’t meet the same goals that a single site, like Twitter, can. People don’t want to have to go to ten different databases for information, not if they can go to just one. Having that single, rich, and growing stream of real-time data is a resource that EVERYONE will want to tap into. It’ll become simply mandatory for any social network, blog, or website.
As for Twitter applications and sites, the ones that make it easier to mine that indispensable stream, and the ones that deliver information to users rather than requiring them to go get it. Well, I think those sites are going to do very well as Twitter’s user base expands beyond the faithful.
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