Tue 1 Sep 2009
I'm going out on a limb: Twitter may still be rising, but before long it'll be on the way out. By Jan 1st, 2011, Twitter will have fewer active users than it does today. Maybe even sooner than that.
Why? Because of the main findings of a surprisingly insightful guest post on Techcrunch by Geoff Cook, CEO of myYearbook. He pulls together the best available evidence on the question of why "Teens don't Tweet", and combines it with his own survey data. The nutshell is: Teens don't tweet for the same reason that most people don't tweet. Twitter doesn't provide much that other services like Facebook and MySpace don't already provide.
Twitter was itself pretty much a clone of earlier services such as Jaiku, recently acquired by Google, then open sourced. When people ask me what Twitter is, I say "Well, it's like Facebook status updates, but without all the other stuff on Facebook." Twitter won't last because its value proposition isn't large enough to sustain a user base beyond the initial fad-driven period. And that period is almost over. Yes, there really is a segment of the market that is hip-deep in micro-blogging, constant sharing. And I think Twitter will live on as an aggregator for news and updates from companies, celebrities, news outlets, and the like. But as a broad-market tool, it's 15-minutes are almost up.
I'm not even sure that Twitter sees Facebook as a direct competitor at the moment, but it ought to, because it's getting out-innovated by them left and right. Facebook's new iPhone app. is fantastic. They're expanding features and APIs, becoming a platform for gaming, for social organizing, for direct communication. Facebook Connect is getting traction, and threading Facebook into a whole network of external sites.
Facebook will survive for the same reason Wikipedia does: it's rich and diverse enough to foster a whole ecosystem around it. That's *very* hard to do, but once you've got that kind of diversity, you've got staying power. In the academic world, Facebook and Wikipedia are called public goods. In many cases, with public goods we're looking for the relatively few individuals who have so many resources, and who benefit disproportionally from the provision of the good, so much so that they're willing to provide the good on everyone's behalf. We called these people 'privileged groups.' The reason that diversity makes Wikipedia and Facebook so stable is that they don't attract just one privileged group, they attract many. There are so many ways to benefit, so many ways to engage, and for each one there's a privileged group. The interests of these groups overlap and enforce each other, together synthesizing a product that's much more valuable. Twitter just can't compete with that.
Technotaste RSS
Twitter is certainly working on creating an ecosystem — though, they have stubbornly refused to be the general-purpose message bus that most developers would like them to be. If your prediction comes true it will largely be due to Twitter's own myopic attempt to keep the family jewels behind the glass case — if the firehose were opened up to the world a whole set of products and companies would flourish.
That's a good point – Twitter's stubborn attitude will have as much to do with its demise as anything. But even if they decide to open up, I just don't think the value proposition is there. It's too one dimensional, even when there will be lots of uses for that dimension. Twitter may very well live on as a general message bus, but that puts it more in league with Ning and Google App Engine than it does with Facebook, MySpace, etc.
can you measure "active users" now? then?
I actually will predict the opposite, that twitter will have more active users in 2011 than now (if we can measure it).
Why? Because Twitter is essentially low-barrier blogging. Many people that can't bring themselves to blog, tweet. Also, there are very interesting audience effects… when I was studying blogging for only a brief time, I always wanted to do qualitative study of blog readers… but how the hell does one sample them? Well, Twitter solved that in a ungraceful way: list them (of course, people can read twitter feeds and not "follow" the person and people can "block" people from following). I think this changes the dynamic considerably from blogging and might exacerbate flame-wars and also tend to nip them in the bud.
For example, I know a certain person follows me that wears the collar on his polo shirts up (it's the latest fashion apparently). I had to think hard before tweeting that I thought this was stupid… I wouldn't have done that with my blog because I have only limited information on who reads that (which permits me not to care!).
Joe,
I think we have to separate the future of micro-blogging from the future of Twitter. I completely agree with you that micro-blogging is here to stay for the good reasons that you mentioned.
But Twitter is neither the first nor the only service to offer micro-blogging. Facebook, you could argue, just does it better, and embeds micro-blogging in a world of other uses and services that will give it power and longevity.
As to the question of "active users", that's an interesting one. There's been some data from Twitter analytics companies revealing (for example) that over half of the people who make a Twitter account never come back after the first week. I'm sure that's true of some people who make Facebook or MySpace accounts too, but nowhere close to 50%.
Every research lab has been studying Twitter this summer, so I think we'll get a raft of interesting data in the next 6 months.
And yet stats released yesterday show that teens are beginning to flock to Twitter.
I'd be interested to see that data. Geoff Cook's data (referenced above) is interesting because he finds that, as a percentage of users, more teens tweet than use Facebook. But Facebook is so much bigger than Twitter, that it's still a very small number of teens (relatively speaking) who Tweet. It wouldn't surprise me if teens catch on to the fad like everyone else, even if it's short-lived.
[...] users, this despite a recent push of new features and new languages. In September I predicted the demise of Twitter, and this seems to be the first stage. 2009 was definitely their year – arguably no [...]