Is Twitter Ridiculous?

Last week, I wrote a post about the demise of Twitter. I didn't say it was going to be this week or in the next month, but it is something to think about. It is easy to say the first to market will win, but history has told us it is easier to make it better than make it first.

I guess one of my biggest concerns is how frivilous the medium is becoming. Case in point, when a Cat can amass over 500,000 followers, it is time to say it has jumped the shark (which is now owned by TV guide - talk about jumping the shark).

This situation has opened up an important question for me - does it matter if half of a million people follow a cat on Twitter and only 57 people follow View from W6th?

Yes and no. Yes, it might make me feel that I could be more popular. No, I like having a small amount of people that I follow and that follow me. It helps to maintain the conversation around the topics that I find useful.

The great things about social networks is that it provides people with the opportunity to connect with others who have common interests - without regard to geographic boundaries. It just seems to me that since Twitter does not have any form of categorization, it has allowed for the fusion of work and play. I know, for a great deal of techies it is the same thing.

I just wonder how scalable that method becomes. You can see people try to impose order through self-generated categories on tools like Twellow. At some point, will Twitter just become background noise that we will want to turn off?

The Demise of Twitter and My Twitter Free Friday

My co-worker said to me "I am getting sick of Twitter" - I understood. It felt like people were twitter crazy and the spammers has already invaded. Yes, the tool has experienced a meteoric rise. According to Google Insights (see inset chart),the term "Twitter" had gone from an index of 12 in January to 100 in April.

As incredible as this might seem, the rise of Twitter seems to have met a peak and started a decline in May.

Looking at the metric I wondered about the overall decline of Twitter. Apparently, I am not the first predicting the demise of the tool. Nielsen posted an article about the subject in late April.

The article points out that: "more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent."

Even more alarming to me is that fact that there are so many new tools being built on Twitter's API. When you see Smashing magazine post an article called "99 Essential Twitter Tools" it makes me think we are already overboard. I don't have 99 essential tools. It is too much. Even worse, what will happen to these essential tools if Twitter goes away or closes their API.

There is a definite Twitter Tribe that feels like the tool is invaluable. When I suggested a Twitter-Free Friday, this is one of the responses I got from noted Visual Thinking Expert Dave Gray "@snookerwolf ha! You might as well suggest an alcohol-free Friday. Good Luck with that! :)"

It will be interesting to watch Twitter and see if it can continue the rise. If it does, who will be knocking at their door with a bag full of cash to buy the technology.

Don't get me wrong, I do like Twitter, but you won't hear a Tweet out of me tomorrow.

Social Media Mashups

Now that the internet age has started to crawl into the days of web troika, the idea of created a social mashup is an interesting one. There are so many tools that are centered around Twitter, it makes me a little nervous.

Don't worry about what happens when the servers fail, what happens if Twitter goes away? A lot of small ventures have been formed around the success of Twitter. As my boss likes to say, only 10% of people on the internet use it.

Why not created something in the spirit of Twitter. As my graduate poetry professor said, "Minor poets borrow. Great poets steal."

Why not take the qualities that made twitter popular - mobile accessibility and brevity - and integrate that into a product.

There are a few people out there doing that - and I don't mean direct Twitter competitors like Plurk. The one that comes to mind is ZapTag.com.

ZapTag is a place where you can vent your road rage about drivers. It has the same trappings of a social network, the brief messaging of Twitter, social media tagging and the integration of Google maps. A social media mashup.

It is not an important website, but some of the comments are hysterical. My current fav is "The red, octagon-shaped sign the person in the glowy vest was holding said STOP. If you can't wait two seconds to let a bunch of kids cross, try leaving your house earlier."

Some are interesting from a legal standpoint because they have busted people who hit and run - "Hit and run. Too bad he does not realize that I have pictures of him and his car."

Mostly, I like seeing that someone else built a functionality that applies brief messaging that was not built on the Twitter API.

Online Mood Board

In the design work, designers and innovative thinking have been using mood boards for decards to help develop design concepts. Agencies and companies often use them as a means to visually communicate with other team members.

Ultimately, the mood board serves as a concrete frame of reference in abstract processes such as interface design, website development, marketing communications, brand creation and fashion design.

The company Image Spark has decided to move the mood board online. It seems like a simple idea. However, in the current state of distance and electronic communication with team member and customers, it is not always possible to be in the same physical space to create a mood board.

This tool creates an online tool for an individual or a team to be able the same types of visuals of a mood board.

These visual tools can be very powerful. Just imagine that I would tell you that I wanted to explain a series of things that are blue and make me happy. That would be pretty hard to envision.

What if I showed you this instead? It would be much easier to understand what I was talking about and the imagery that I had in mind.

The Image Spark tool also allows you to share with the community, create a source for images, assign tags and keep your images private.

There are definite short comings to the tool, but overall, the concept of online mood boards is one worth exploring.