Twitter in a bad mood ?
For several weeks or months, Twitter is considered as the hottest application, the place to be. I had several thought about it to say…
- Is Twitter a fashion victim ?
Billboard to support @aplusk
For example, the fight between Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and CNN to get 1.000.000 followers was stupid but everybody heard about this. In United States, many people joined the micro blogging platform… Oprah’s arrival in the same way contributed to this quick growth. In the meantime, early adopters did not appreciate this and felt disapointed… yes they were less hot that they were several weeks before 
. So, I (I was not alone) started to see more and more people on new services like FriendFeed or Tumblr, I received several friend requests on these services… why ? Because several persons consider them as the next places to be.
However, it’s a good thing for nice tools such as FriendFeed or Tumblr. Facebook knew the same problem (but it did not get so big, indeed with now more than 200 millions users (and more than 160M active ones) and a recent translation in several indians languages), when you are not considered as fashioned, you lose some interest and some users. Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Tumblr and many others are social networks. So the more the people are, the more interesting it is for everyone. The connections and the communities are easier to build and more effective.
- FriendFeed, Tumblr, what are they for ?
FriendFeed, created in the beginning of 2008, aggregates 57 services (blogs, social networks, from video platforms to status ones) in an unique feed. It reminds you Facebook ? Yes, that’s normal, Facebook has been inspired by FriendFeed many times. So when you put something anywhere on internet, you find it just next on FriendFeed. Concerning Tumblr, I would say this is in somehow the hard drive of your Twitter account. You post all your interesting links, videos, chats, songs, texts or quotes and it sends it to Twitter… Of course, on both of them, you have friends, you suscribe to their feed… So, you’re still connected on Twitter but Tumblr is, for me, a perfect complementary tool to Twitter.
- In general, do people understand how Twitter works ?
Twitter gives the chance to anyone, to any brand to build your online real-time community. As we saw before in several posts on this blog, communication is not anymore Mass Media where one who gives the message to many people. We’re talking about myMedia now. That means everybody gives the message and passes it on. It is now more important to have a small but effective friend community. Many people who just arrived on Twitter try to get as many friends as possible whithout trying to create any link. That’s useless and do not correspond to what Twitter is relevant for. You can see about this topic 2 videos from Seth Godin about the tribes and the second one in French from Loic Le Meur – How to create a community and develop a product with it.
- #fixreplies
Now, Twitter wants to hide replies to people you don’t follow. It is probably to make Twitter more simple (that’s true that you don’t get so quickly how the @replies work to the beginning) but we lose a big part of the interest of Twitter… The Facebook group is here. Of course, we’ll see how @ev & @biz (the Twitter founders) will react.
In a very short time, Twitter doubled its number of users to get around 15 millions users now but knows some difficulties to develop itself.
