No Signal to Noise - why Twitter failed
This article has been published on Homepage Daily, please view it there. It was an interesting experiment, but Twitter has been spammed out before it even got mainstream. Twitter, a micro-blogging service where users send and read posts of up to 140 characters called tweets, is aptly and deliberately named for its very low ratio of signal to noise. We’d don’t know, as Twitter won’t release hard facts, how many users it has and how it plans to make money. But in early 2009, Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382% and total users were estimated at just under 20 million. That’s a lot of user data, and the only real asset Twitter has right now. Sounds good? In fact, the hype may have been Achilles’ hell. Once word got out it was a great way to reach a large audience for free, it was hi-jacked by salespeople long before the customers arrived. Pollies, porn sites, police and spammers – meet your new Twitter friends. Trends, topics that are mentioned the most in tweets, are mainly propagated a...