Tweeting is Fleeting

The hallmark of a fad is that it is decidely short-lived.  Perhaps the most famous example is the pet rock.  It's not surprising that it was the brain child of an ad man.  After all, advertising can create demand.  Can it sustain demand?  Not, apparently, for pet rocks.

I'm pretty sure Twitter is a fad.  I've commented on previous posts here about how the MySpace phenomenon took off.  In a nutshell: MySpace allowed people to do what they wanted with the web, namely to easily set up a personal web page that could be linked to friends' pages, without having to learn the lingua franca of the web.  It wasn't that MySpace did something that was technically exceptional.  It used existing technology to increase accessibility and thereby accessed a new audience.

What does Twitter offer?  In a word: Nothing.  Or perhaps less than nothing, given that the only thing Twitter offers that RSS doesn't is a hard limit on datagram size - the now famous 140 character limit that we all loved so much on our cell phones.

Then why is it so popular?  Twitter bears some similarity to MySpace in that it brings an existing technology model, namely RSS (although admittedly a crippled version), to a new audience.  Also, an endorsement from Oprah never hurts.  I worked in a book store in the late 90s.  We had to be on our toes anytime Oprah rubber stamped a new book.  The phone would start ringing off the hook before the show was over.

I hear she endorsed a guy named Obama for President.  Whatever happened to him?

Anyhow.

What are the long-term prospects for Twitter like?  After all, MySpace is still very popular.  Will Twitter follow suit?  My guess: No.  Why do I think this?  It's because the distance between MySpace and HTML is much greater than the distance between Twitter and RSS.  Also, learning HTML doesn't negate MySpace.  In fact, it can enable you to "enhance" your MySpace page, typically resulting in an unreadable, seizure-enducing mess that makes me want to rip out my eyes so that I can stuff them into my ears, thus putting a stop to the T-Pain soundtrack that you have so kindly embedded.  Learning about RSS, on the other hand, makes you realize that you have no need for Twitter.  It's vastly more flexible, nearly ubiquitous and, this is key, is really no harder to use once you know that it exists.

This article in today's Computerworld confirms that although people are flocking to Twitter en masse, they aren't sticking around:

It seems that while people are joining the micro-blogging site in droves, a whole lot of them don't sticking around for long. A Nielsen Co. report released yesterday shows that 60% of Twitter users do not return to the microblogging site the next month. And for the 12 months prior to Oprah Winfrey joining Twitter this month with great media fanfare, the site had a retention rate of less than 30%.

Ouch.  Perhaps this is because the site is so young?  Perhaps not:

Compared to the early years of social networking giants Facebook and MySpace, Twitter's retention is still bad. Both Facebook and MySpace had twice the retention rate that Twitter does now, Nielsen reported. When their audiences ballooned, so did their retention rates. Both companies now have about a 70% retention rate.

For what it's worth, the pet rock fad lasted for about six months.  Twitter has more capital behind it, but they've already tapped the Poperah.  She can lead them to Twitter, but she can't make them tweet - at least not indefinitely.