Posts tagged twitter

It seems like there’s a lot of people really hoping that App.net, is going to teach Twitter and its big brother, Facebook, a lesson of some sort. The service will be ad-free and subscription-driven, and promises to put ‘users and developers […] first, not advertisers’.

The intentions are certainly good and I’ve no doubt they are technically highly competent, but I can’t see this working for two reasons:

1. Ultimately, its success will be judged on the number of people using the platform. Charging a fee, no matter how tiny, will be a showstopper for most people. So I don’t predict any mass exodus from the big two to App.net.
2. But even if it were free… I asked a colleague recently, what it would take to get him to switch from Facebook to Brand X, and similarly to convince most of his friends to move and couldn’t come up with anything. We agreed it would take something pretty incredible — a feature or service that dwarfed in its awesomeness everything else out there*. Remember that Google with its considerable has been unable to get a decent chunk of the social-media market.

None of this is to say that Twitter’s future looks all that rosy (I actually think it’s looking a bit bleak at the moment) or that Facebook can sit back on its laurels (I think it’s a one-company bubble — i.e. grossly overvalued and there will be price to pay once investors realize this). And there’s always the possibility that something new and unexpected will come along that will make social-networks suddenly seem — oh so noughties. 

* I did eventually come up with one idea that he said would get him to switch but I’ll save that for another day.