Inevitable death of Twitter; reasons behind the downfall of the Internet behemoth

One or Two reasons why Twitter Will Die

You know, you’re cool. As you sit enjoying a nice cappuccino and a Virginia slim, you are not only enjoying the smooth bliss that is your morning, you are soaking up the rich personal experiences around you. The man and woman sitting next to you made it clear in line that they had relationship problems; he ordered soy, and she ordered chai. They’ll probably break up soon, you think. You always can tell with that sort of thing. You felt smug getting the table in the sun; they had to wait for their drink to be made, and you ordered it two hours ahead of time online. As you watch the furious flurry of the world go by, it occurs to you that you are special. You are a reporter, an observer, someone with something to say, in a sea of drones and have-nots. And sweet Jesus, isn’t it nice to tell everyone? As a true child of the digital age, you whip your Blackberry out of its waist holster and tell everyone what a fine morning you are having.

“Damn, I’m having a fine morning,” you say to the world on Twitter.com. You can’t tell exactly who heard you, but you suppose you’ll find out. After all, 106 million registered users could be listening. How do you know they aren’t? 

Other than the intrinsic pretentiousness of some of its users, there are a few reasons that Twitter.com will eventually die out, or never reach the full level of usage that anyone intended it to. The first has to do with the fact that as a culmination and combination of modern social networking ideas, it is one that has little individuality and limited use. Your profile has a short bio, just like Myspace, Facebook, and all the networking sites that never made it big: Xanga, Bebo, Mypraize. After that, most of the self-expression on the web comes from your statuses, or tweets: What are you doing? What are you thinking? What are you thinking of doing? Are you hungry now? Where are your car keys?

The modern conception of any sort of digital self can be stemmed back all the way to the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. At that time they were old, primitive chat rooms, restricted to only the extremely geeky. Still, they created a free flow of information much in the same way that Twitter’s web site says it does. But you could only access it when you dialed up; it could take hours, days, weeks, for someone to respond to what you had wrote. To make the online flow of information more immediate, instant messaging was born, and was widely used in the 90s; I would suspect that many of us could identify the quick, three-toned noise that you hear when sending or receiving an AIM message. 

The online self-expression that started with tweaking the color and font of AIM profiles turned into an entire website of your very own (your space, if you will). It became so personalize-able to some that it took 20-25 seconds to load all shit in their space before they greeted you with their profile picture, nametag nicely boasting 11,000 friends. It didn’t take too long for everybody to realize that this was tacky; and that Facebook was much more respectable and orderly. But the clutter came in just the same, and the icons of useless self-definitions made their way back into the online lives of millions. 

Social networking eventually proved to be more than just silly fonts, nicknames, and groups of short personal ethos. Behind newspapers all over the world, eyebrows of the white and bald were raised when Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace in 2005 for $650 million. What was he doing? Was there something there? It turned out that yes, there was. Amongst all this Googling and blogging and webcamming, there was indeed money to be made from social networking. 

The simple incentive was there in 2005 and is still there: if you can predict where any of these online trends are going and start a company that is headed that way too, you can make a bunch of money. Nobody sat back in their desk chair overlooking a vast city, and while watching the rain patter against the office window, thought up the idea of Myspace. It was a series of calculations, based on observations on the state of the Web, humans, and predicted services one could provide that didn’t exist yet.

So far, Twitter has had around $1 billion dollars poured into it, and on April 13 they unveiled their first advertising scheme that would, in turn, make money for the company. It will include “promoted Tweets,” which are similar to Google’s sale of adspace based on keywords in searches. Twitter has also signed deals with large search engines like Google and Bing to allow tweets to come up in search results. Whether this will work is anyone’s guess, although there are no doubt office buildings full of psychologists trying to figure out how their clients can inevitable take your money.

However, as an idea, Twitter is limited. How far can its use be stretched and twisted to make new things? It’s basically an offshoot of Facebook; the idea of a status stripped away and enlarged. Twitter is like Facebook, but more current: what are you doing NOW? WHAT ABOUT NOW? WHAT ABOUT AFTER THAT? 

So, when that dazed techie from San Francisco had an acid flashback, Twitter seemed like the next logical step in a world getting faster every minute. But its use comes into question outside of the realms of trendiness, and annoyance. Trying to discern whether to invest in a business from a Twitter page is next to impossible; character is tough to spot amongst flashy YouTube videos and blabber. As cool as it is to hear about good restaurants online, word of mouth will always exist. So will cooking at home. Sure, you can become a follower or fan, but you do so on the assumption that someone cares. Probably a lot less do than you think, regardless of how many followers you have.

As the volume of information on the web increases, the relevancy and interest potential decreases. It’s just math, man. If we’re friends, tell me how you’re doing, how your week is going. Tell me about your day, if we’re married, and tell me how you’ve been if you’re an old friend I haven’t seen in a while. Don’t tell me about your last 30 minutes though, because honestly, I don’t give a damn what you just had for lunch.