If you’ve been reading some of the comments on TechCrunch recently, perhaps you’ve noticed some backlash against our coverage of Twitter. As is usually the case with comments, a small, but vocal minority get all worked up about something and air their grievances — over and over again. And that’s fine. More often than not, the comments are amusing, and sometimes they’re even insightful. We’ve actually already weighed in on the topic of Twitter coverage once before, a few months ago, but seeing as I’m now the primary driver of Twitter stories on the site, I thought I’d take this weekend afternoon to weigh in myself.
Simply put, we write about Twitter so often because right now, it matters. From news organizations to movie stars, from earthquakes to fires, from Facebook to Google — everyone seems to be talking about, to or with Twitter. In an era of mass communication, it is the latest medium. And it’s fundamentally changing the ways in which people interact with others using the web. What you may view as a stupidly simple service with no real point, I view as one of the few inspirational products in bleak times.
I would argue that Twitter works so well precisely because it’s so simple. It fools some people with its “What are you doing?” question that resides at the top of the page, but Twitter can pretty much be about whatever you want it to be about. That’s why it’s an absolutely brilliant platform for so many new startups to build on top of. And those startups are really the key. They’re what are keeping Twitter so hot right now. Every day, something new launches on top of Twitter; some get coverage, some don’t. Some are silly, some are smart, some might actually work. But overall, the level of activity around the platform is amazing.
And that activity, fuels growth and feeds the system full of its most important life-blood: Information. It’s this real-time information that is Twitter’s most valuable asset. And it’s information that Twitter will soon begin mining in more interesting ways with its search product — which should be useful to a lot of people. And it should lead to even more innovation and more startups.
Stop and think for a moment about any one startup that has had such an impact on other startups. There aren’t many, and there really hasn’t been one for a while. I suppose you could throw Facebook in there, and before that obviously Google. But really, there aren’t too many companies in general that are changing the ways others do things, the way Twitter is right now.
And that’s why I think it’s worth writing about so often. It’s not just about Twitter, the product, it’s also about Twitter, the idea. And Twitter, the catalyst of change. Twitter has shaken shit up in the industry. And it’s exciting as hell when a company does that, because the subsequent chaos almost always breeds cool new things. And “cool new things” is what technology is and always has been about.
And if you’ve been paying attention, Twitter is hardly the only thing in technology to have gotten a lot of hype and draw complaints for getting too much coverage in the past few years. We saw it with Google, we saw it with Facebook, we saw it with the iPhone and then we saw it again with the App Store. What do all of these things share in common? They all shook shit up. They were all great products, all became very popular, and all caused industry shifts. Twitter is just the latest of these. But it won’t be the last.
When that something new comes along, we’ll be on it, covering it relentlessly too. Because these things matter, because we’re passionate about them and because the vast majority of readers do care.
And at least we’re not gushing over the people behind the scenes at Twitter as they go out drinking at night, like The New York Times did today. Not yet, anyway.
[photo: flickr/ndanger]
Ha Ha! That’s funny MG!
twitter is going to fail.. for sure… matter of time….
how can twitter fail? if you mean by becoming less popular over time, you really cant consider that “failing.”
everything becomes less popular over time, so does everything fail?
“That’s why it’s an absolutely brilliant platform for so many new startups to build on top of. And those startups are really the key. They’re what are keeping Twitter so hot right now.”
LOL..dont call every website launched a startup..A startup is what you would trade your life savings for, in order to get your dream business working..
The only reason people are working on “startups” based on the twitter app is simply because it gets them instant PR. If I am going to work on a stock trading platform, no amount of elevator pitches is going to get me the PR I am looking for. On the other hand a simple app which will pull in all tweets with a ‘$’; a “startup” I build in three hours will get my site reviewed by the so-called biggest technology blogs like Twittercrunch.
So, that is precisely why everyone is working on a site based on twitter app. Get done away with your twitter obsession and the number of twitter based apps would also fall!
If anything is going to start to fail it would have to be social networking sites such as Facebook. If recent MySpace layoffs are any indication of the future, look for the popularity of Facebook to drop. Personally I had just canceled my account, because for a social networking site, it makes people way less social in real life.
Twitter, however, is also not just a Facebook status update, that everyone thinks it is. I thought the same when I first signed up, and quickly stopped to use it. Yet, now that I use Twitter for information gathering and spreading on topics of interest, it has taken over.
From just telling people what you did, with links to sites and google maps or what have you, to using it as a micro blog, I think Twitter will be around for a long time.
twitter has blown up, certainly, but you forget that twitter fails to engage and retain users. and what does myspace’s layoff situation have to do with facebook’s popularity?
And Twitter makes people more socialable in real life than Facebook? Can you explain? What about the ability to organise events etc that happen in real life alot easier than you could by group sending an email?
You are in a minority, you cancelled your account and you think the majority of 200 million people are going to follow?
Bottom line: if something doesn’t work, we don’t use it. Twitter works.
Tomorrow? Twitter will morph. It’s already happening as we use it for search. Next we will want platforms like TweetDeck to move from organizational tool to full on community builders.
Those who want it to fail are just jealous that they didn’t think of it first.
No chance bro!
The answer is simple. Twitter rocks. Twitter is the new big man on campus.
All the startups that are trying to build real time search products, from Google to Friendfeed to Yauba have ample reason to be scared.
It does rock. We were able to leverage it’s popularity to allow our users to notify friends and family when they’ve updated their collections — something we would have had real trouble doing for people who weren’t already part of our site.
Thanks Twitter!
Bah. You lost me at “leverage”. Such is the word of Sanjay.
lol , but really one post about twitter daily is enough, where are the new start up stories ?
any news about web3.0 ?
The thing about Twitter (daft name, but it works) is it’s remaining a hot product because of gradual effectiveness and it’s ease of use – I’ve got about a dozen people to join without even stressing it,
I still maintain it shouldn’t ask “What are you doing?” because the way it has developed , closer to it’s core, partly because of so many corporate users and tinyurl links and the like, it should now actually ask “What are you thinking?” because some users are trying to get us to think their way. Bad, but if we take a detached enough view, can take their pushes with a pinch of salt…
Please tweet me with your comments on this idea.
twitter is down again. is it scheduled mr. fanboy?
The great thing is that 5 years from now, we’ll see who was right and who was wrong. I’ve been following the tech industry for 20+ years. Twitter will be huge.
Twitter has 2-3 years to go.
Amen
MG:
You can’t please everyone here and most readers that don’t blog aren’t going to understand the importance of covering newsworthy topics and following up on those stories. Keep up the great work!
Yeah, we’ve never really considered what readers want to read. We write about what we like and what we think is important. Readers come or they don’t.
Nonsense. You do it for the same reason any media outlet does anything: ratings. For whatever reason, Twitter generates a lot of comments, which means lots of visitors sticking around for a long time, which is good for ad sales. And since twitter IS tech-related, it provides you the cover to do it.
I will have to agree with Michael. That is really nonsense.
bullshit, you care about what your readers think or want to read, if you loose loosers you loose ad revenue… don’t lie about you don’t care what readers think no one believes that BS
If you actually think Arrington cares about what readers think, then you don’t understand how business work today.
He knows he can’t please everyone, so he doesn’t even try. He goal is provide a useful service to the people who do come–not chasing the 99% of the people who’ll never come. The people who get the importance of Twitter and the other things that TC covers will keep coming. But regarding the people who think TC is lame and doesn’t cover relevant topics, Arrington doesn’t care.
It’s similar to Apple and Steve Jobs: he doesn’t sell to over 90% of the computer buying public. He doesn’t chase the people who want to buy a $299 machine from Walmart, because that’s not who Apple is. In that sense, Jobs doesn’t care about the vast majority of people who buy computers. But Apple is the most profitable hardware manufacturer on a profit margin basis, with over $29 billion in the bank. Funny–when Apple switched to Intel processors in 2006, many people thought they should get out of the hardware business and license Mac OS X to PC makers. That looks incredibly foolish when you look back at it now.
Albert: You’re confusing the sound business practice of serving a market niche with the poor business practice of not caring what your customers think. It’s quite evident from the consistent active response to Twitter stories that TC readers care about Twitter. Whether the reaction is negative or positive really doesn’t matter. But the day that Twitter stories stop garnering page views will be the day TC stops writing about it. The “Arrington doesn’t give a sh*t what people think” is part of his brand, but like most branding it’s more hype than reality.
I have exactly the same attitude. Write what needs to be written.
You can’t please everybody, and you shouldn’t try. Sure, it’s great to have an insanely popular blog, but if you try to cater to the crowd instead of writing what *you* want to write, you’ll get bored. And it will show.
Yes, we get it. Twitter is fascinating to anyone in the media business. And right now a lot of people think they are in the “media business.” Soon they will find they were right about “media” but wrong about “business.”
LOL. So far for marketing talks.
MG, good explanation on the Twitter coverage. Think TC readers would be a little soothed by this post. Just one thing which stuck me when I read this post – why did you not list as points/numbers the things you wanted to say. That would have been more easy to read than an essay-like post. Anyhow, that is your style and this is just a suggestion from my side.
Yes, Twitter is going big and all attention is being poured into it. No wonder you guys are covering it so well. By the way, you can have a TwitterCrunch also. Ask Evan and Dorsey if they are willing. It would be great fun.
its incredibly annoying every few days seeing another article on techcrunch about twitter being down for maaintenance
perhaps you’re referring to TechCrunch circa May 2008 then? cause as far as I know, Twitter has only been down once in the past several weeks for a planned maintenance.
sites go down all the time for maintenance, why does it need an article.
and why does said article need anonymous comments bitching about said article?
MG Siegler, you are a great writer, and Twitter is probably the most important company in the Valley right now. Keep writing about it, and ignore these idiots.
BTW, I keep like 10 RSS feeds and one of them is your Instapaper feed.
@cherman – thanks, re:instapaper, that’s awesome, never heard of anyone doing that for someone else’s instapaper, but a solid idea given how open it is.
@Cherman that’s a sad indictment of the Valley.
yeah i agree
Self-propelling hype Wag-The-Dog style is the SV’s MAIN business-model.
I was thinking today… The world is in the middle of major modernization, tens of billions are spent on it every day… where’s this bunch of cronies, calling themself Sv on the map of this epic battle?
Gimme a microscope strong enough to see these wonderful tiny bacteria.
Twitter is doing what facebook was already moving towards and in fact also doing. I don’t mind seeing the odd twitter article here or there but it is getting beyond crazy, and clearly I am not the only one who thinks so. It is one thing to cover the app store (for instance), but to write a new post every time a new app is released for weeks or months on end would be ridiculous. I like techcrunch, but really if there isn’t a broad amount of tech topics it is going to become pretty boring very fast. Cover twitter by all means, but surely it is not the only interesting thing going on in Tech at the moment…
The fact that every mention of their latest “down time” has to be prefaced by the word “planned” makes it obvious that everybody is sensitive about Twitter’s sucky reliability. Down time is down time. Such is the word of Sanjay.
Instructions for TC readers that don’t want to see anymore posts about Twitter:
Go to the next post
…and since the next one most likely one refers to twitter….
amd no its not changing the way people interact, its just another social network wth little code looking to cash in. its a rehashd cheap version of facebook status updates.
Are you visiting? Twitter has existed since way before Facebook started “updates”. Guess you weren’t in the know then…
Twitter DEFINITELY changes the way people interact. BTW, its not a “Social Network” by traditional definitions of the term. At any rate, if you see Twitter as a “rehashed cheap version for facebook status updates,” just don’t use it. Thats some intense tunnel vision though.
Yawn.
i heard they made a new adblock they called it adtwitter should be available for download soon
Already done:
http://www.iizu.../notwit.user.js
I’m so going to twitter about this….btw the next hot thing we’ll all be talking about is that “red matter” stuff. I’ll twitter that too!
yeah, red matter is the shit.
Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Such is the word of Sanjay.
I’d like to see a return of the posts bashing the Canadian government and people like Tyler Cavell, who’s father nearly destroyed my company with unfair bandwidth access fees.
So if you need a filler, please do that. Remember the Canadian government is rampant with italian mafia figures like Alphonse Gagliano who were put in charge of the MERX system responsible for awarding public monies to private companies for technology contracts, crooks like Brian Mulroney(theif), Jean Cretien(crooked mouthed retarded french theif), and of course Stephen Harper(insurance fraud theif-Cadman), that rampantly steal from small business and people in general, freaks like Ralph Klein who liked to stop at homeless shelter and insult homeless people and throw change at them, ect…
Why not expose the government of Canada instead?
There are at least 20+ mafia figures running various ministries there, and the french ministers are backed by motorcycle gangs.
Remember the no car pooling? Mafia. Right there. That’s why it upset so many people. Law 101 in Quebec denying free speech to non French business owners and software producers. Mafia. Everything about Canada is dirty and crooked.
Why not talk about that.
In 1997 Hong Kong was handed over to the Chinese by the British because they realized that what they did was wrong.
Why can’t Canada be similarly handed back over to the United States?
Canada belongs to the United States anyway.
It’s something you all should consider.
Ahhh…. humm… no.
The Brits handed over HK to the Chinese because the British’s 99-year lease on HK ended. There was no morality or ethics behind the action.
Durrrrrr
As for the Canada comment… I believe your Ritalin need to be upped.
No, I do not. The UK’s lease on Canada ended the day they lost the American revolutionary war.
The UK had to put the worst thugs in power that would be corrupt enough to let them continue to have governance over the country. MacDonald, Laurier, Mulroney, Harper, and even crookedy mouthed fracoretardophone Cretien.
Every single minister since MacDonald has been a stupid drunken bastard. Why is that?
Why is there still a royal oath? Why was free speech compromised in Quebec in lieu of what amounts to a gang?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Act
“the British were worried that the French Canadians might also support the growing rebellion.”
Why did this last for hundreds of years all the way to law 101? They know that violates even basic human rights to free speech.
Hong Kong was very much like Canada.
Except their “lease” hasn’t come to an end quite yet.
The US should put Harper and the others away just as it did with Conrad Black and we should impose our way of life there. Canadians would be so much better off. Just as people in HK are better off now.
Do people really enjoy having the Mafia run their country? I was there, and I know that they do not.
Sorry, I had called Cretien “fracoretardophone” when I actually meant to call him a “francoretardophone”.
My bad.
“Every single minister since MacDonald has been a stupid drunken bastard. ”
I should clarify, MacDonald himself was a stupid drunken bastard, and a thief. The perfect record is intact.
Why do you have a governor general that represents another country that can veto a bill in your country?
Why are your laws and charters underwritten by the leader of another country?
Twitter is re-defining search by bringing in the value of real-time streams. Question is, that if they want to start monetizing themselves with a real revenue model, does Twitter still really want to fly solo? My two cents at http://blog.jippidy.com/?p=43
MG- While twitter is the hot thing now I’m not sure it matters as much as you think. It matters because it has a self-fueling-press-feedback loop. It has momentum but it hasn’t done anything exciting other then search recently.
If friendfeed or some other similar company had the same level of press you would see more companies writing to their platform and in turn more stories about it.
i write about friendfeed quite a bit too greg, but i disagree about it as a platform, because it way more complicated than twitter is. friendfeed is awesome for a lot of things, but companies building things on top of it (at least right now), is not one of them.
that said, real-time rooms have potential depending on how they choose to use them.
Your argument doesn’t fully make sense. I get that twitter has a powerful ecosystem of apps developed on top of it. BUT so do other companies and you don’t cover that ecosystem as much as you do with Twitter. IMO the iPhone has a much more powerful dev ecosystem but you guys don’t give it NEARLY as much coverage as you do with Twitter. As for Facebook, I don’t remember you guys covering every single app that launched on Facebook.
My point being, you can tone it down. The article about background color changes or font changes or Twishiter is a step to far. If a true innovation is developed on top of it, then great, write it up.
If not, then perhaps another startup in need of coverage can get discovered by TechCrunch.
That’s pretty funny. Such is the word of Sanjay.
i’ve been spending some time on friendfeed lately and there’s some stuff going on there that’s interesting. may have some thoughts on this soon.
Top 4 boring things for people not into Twitter:
4) Mass media hype around Twitter
3) Techcrunch posts about Twitter
2) Techcrunch posts defending the importance of posting about Twitter.
1) Twitter
Honestly it does seem a bit odd at times when I come to TechCrunch and see as many Twitter articles present in the most recent entries. And it’s not so bad the seemingly large amount of coverage on Twitter as it is the lower amount of coverage on everything else.
That said, I do agree with the sentiment “move on to the next entry.” When I browse TC any article title that doesn’t appeal to me I usually skip over and move on to the next article. If I don’t see the importance in the subject matter or it didn’t really pique my interest, seems silly to read through the article and then banter about it existing.
Um #lobster is a trending topic on Twitter right now. One problem: it is all spam. Why isn’t TechCrunch writing about that?
That is actually quite interesting that Twitter doesn’t realize that all those tweets and accounts are scripted.
Techcrunch should probably write about that.
the trending topic bs is hilarious someone gamed their system too easily
but i just promised no more twitter posts today (maybe) in my title!
Robert, as a power user of Twitter at one point I must say that it is not all spam and it is silly to say that in all due respect. You can get as much or as little as you want out of Twitter, Just like Friendfeed and IF friendfeed gains mass usage like Twitter you will see the same issues arise
Locally here in NC we’ve tried to get #kurtloder to trend… but apparently #lobster is more popular than #kurtloder
http://twitter....?q=%23kurtloder
the old kurt loder meme.
The old kurt loder meme will be the yarn that the elderly people will tell their grandkids about one day… that is if the kids grandkids can tear their attention away from thoughtter.com’s neural pathway interface. http://www.yout...h?v=205dHV55XWQ
Apparently unofficial Techcrunch Brazil already has this story: http://jornalte...ch-com-lobster/
personally, I am not a big fan of participating in Twitter. However, I definitely the value proposition in its search. So far, I’ve been a big fan of http://www.boilingpage.com, the real time search engine based on twitter. But, if it’s integrated within twitter, that’ll be the killer app. But, for now, I’ll stick with http://www.boilingpage.com that shows the hottest pages on the web in real time.
come on!!! you guys have over 1 mill readers who care about the 0,1 % unhappy person.. sounds like facebook mini election ( they drive only 600 000 votes when they have 200 mil members…)
don’t change because of them…
keep doing your good work …
yeah, there are currently no plans to vote on this
All it takes is one person to ruin that concert vibe sometimes…
http://www.yout...h?v=VkXGdtntGp8
Why isn’t TechCrunch writing about #lobster which is trending topic spam on Twitter right now?
Less Twitter, More DanceJam.
Both are just as viable as businesses.
appreciate your honesty about the industry being bleak. there is not any game changing stuff in the mainstream. the market is flooded with functionality. twitter is neat but is not a realtime game changer. realtime is not that important. everything on the internet is already realtime. backtype offers a great alert/search service for blogs that scans the internet as a whole.
im not seeing the interaction at twitter. people dont go there to have conversations. i recently asked my 130 members why are they following me? i got one answer. @theusername said that he is following me because i have huge potential in mobile. twitter cant be a fadbook or myspaze. twitter seems like a microblog skype. a functionality syndicate widget app that will never be a major internet destination gateway. the value of its search content is weak. i already get better blog discovery content from backtype.
-twitter should sell or spend that money and acquire something they dont have…..strategic niche offerings.
ChangeLocator.com – pivot yourself
uselesslocator.com — that’s right, you have nothing to say and your site is useless.
exactly… you thelocatordude.com is a tool
Do you have to use the word “shit” to make your point because you think that makes you more interesting?
You have the understanding of technology of an 11th grader.
Thanks for another insight-less book report of a post.
Hmm, I have nothing to write about, let me write about Twitter and how when someone has nothing to write about, it is OK to write about how great twitter is again.
If you’re going to be an anonymous troll, at least try to be either insightful or amusing. As it stands now you’re worse than the word of Sanjay, which means you pretty much blow.
OMG! Someone *swore* on the Interwebs!
The common thread between Twitter, Google, iPhone and Facebook is the business model that provides the opportunity for others to make a business out of riding the wave and developing products that enhance all. So Mike, Keep writing about TWITTER, it will encourage more innovation.
Love the passion in @Parislemon’s tone to the whole article.
You have made techcrunch interesting again for me.
If twitter is building the next set of apps, its apt that techcrunch should cover the ecosystem.
There is a very disturbing trend in the media to report stories based only on what other news outlets are talking about. Take swine flu for example: non-stop coverage in the media, but nothing special about it.
I feel the same effect has happened with twitter. Different news outlets have convinced themselves that twitter is a revolutionary ‘real time’ application that will change communication as we know it. I like to compare twitter to the ‘real time’ polls that CNN did during the presidential debates. They put 20 people in a room, and had them record their reaction to what the candidates said. The people polled had no time to reflect on what was said in order to create a useful response. As a result, their responses ended up matching the existing talking points, with no original ideas.
Real time is cool, but it has to deliver interesting and original content. For the most part, twitter just doesn’t do this.
So the key if you want a lot of coverage on Techcrunch is not to go begging for coverage when you launch its to build a great product that gets massive adoption, shakes up the industry and then makes Techcrunch writers so excited to jump on your bandwagon that they write about you incessantly.
right cause techcrunch hasn’t been covering twitter since day one, and i haven’t personally been covering it in depth for over 2 years.
not only was there not a bandwagon back then, there wasn’t a road.
Agreed. I was not trying to be cynical, just making a rather obvious mental note to myself which I thought was worth sharing with other entrepreneurs.
There are several recurring themes here that are surprisingly being overlooked – the twitter cycle is NOTHING new.
The first is that everyone loves being part of what is perceived “next big thing” (which MG has obviously taken hold of with Twatt3r “covering it for 2 yrs” – quite an investment). This creates bias. (find me 1 article MG has written that negatively impacts Twitter).
Now combine this passionate bias with vocal power through TechCrunch and you get 20 posts a day. This constant chatter builds brand awareness/mindshare and inevitably creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Interestingly enough, for whatever reason, humans are just as quick to tear something down they helped promote and build – enter all of TC’s nonstop rips on Facebook nowadays, pre 200M users/ we’re a staple on the net. Mark my words, once Twit has peaked, the tear down will begin.
Finally, adoption. Humans are innately born with without purpose. The internet created on a new, endless vehicle for people to occupy our time with. Twit is just the latest, most addicting thing. After “filling in our network” FB remains vibrant bc its a great stalking vehicle. Never fear Twit haters, the one thing you can count on, we are Americans and will be jaded with meaningless updates just as fast as Twit entered our lives. Then we’ll be off to the next time-sink. yay.
Twitter has been a interesting experience for me and I for one find it amazing that everyone the Women on The View to Yoko Ono seem to think it is worth playing around with.
I know I could track down just about anyone and leave a message for them, but Twiiter makes it feel like I am actually speaking to them.
So yeah Twitter matters, even if there are still a lot of people who don’t get it.
@bluebock i am gonna make tea
@redrock I am drinking tea
@suckzrocks Oooh teas up
@blowzrockz t t t
Twitter is the best we can do?..MG wake up dude
http://ianlawre...e-were-promised
@MG How bout you do a poll? “As a TechCrunch reader, are you happy with the level of Twitter coverage?” – “Yes its great”, “No – too many articles on Twitter”, “Meh, don’t really care”.
That way you can really see if the “vocal minority” is really a minority? Personally, I haven’t commented in any previous article but I do feel the twitter coverage is a bit over the top and need to be scaled down a fraction.
well, you guys might want to go all out and open up a twitter section or something
Dude, there’s this thing called email. Its huge in Japan. Maybe you should write more about email, since its so huge. In fact, my email provider had an outage today, but I didn’t see one thing about it on Techcrunch.
Reality is that Twitter is huge only in isolated groups. The reasons why are far more interesting than your coverage. Maybe you should explore the types of people who are into Twitter, and those who aren’t. That would be interesting reporting. Such is the word of Sanjay.
Email is big in japan. Twitter is big in usa.
Big? Hah. I’d say its “hot”, but hardly big.
you think so?
Compare the numbers of e-mail users to the twittermob numbers. I’m not even talking about the number of active e-mail accounts.
it would be nice if you actually started covering startups again; like mine.
First of all. Lets sieve through all the Twitter Hype. The only thing that Twitter has done to change anything or that is of any value is Real Time Search.
Besides this what else am I missing? And don’t mention Twitpay, Twitpic, Twitmama or Twitters default url shortner etc.
All the glowing reports about Twitter reminds me of the Bush adminstration when the press failed to ask questions. They just played along.
Spending so much time about Twitter takes away from other Startups. The problem is a lack of variety.
Tulips, that’s all i can say, is Tulips…
Unless Twitter begins to find out how to make a profit… I will ask the question:
How soon until we dead pool twitter?
My issue is that TC is raving about the greatest thing since sliced bread but with any true non-nonprofit start-up, the first and only goal is to make a profit. But that seems to be only glanced upon every now and then verses the glowing twitter wonder stories. (maybe I am no longer in my twenties and my focus has shifted from shinny object wow to sustainability/profitability but that is where I stand)
I agree but truth be told twitter will get sold to a large corporation that will dump millions into it trying to make money from it (Youtube)… It is not headed for the deadpool anytime soon.
Twitter is bringing the concept of real-time web in front of everyone as never seen before, it’s truly a breakthrough. Just Keep posting!
Just to put things in perspective, here’s Mashable’s post on 11 Important Social Media stories for today – http://mashable...ial-media-news/
6 of the 11 are directly about Twitter, and 3 more have Twitter as a main topic within the story.
I was one (albeit on another site that covers Twitter 24/7) that complained it was just too much. But after almost 2 years of reading the blah blah blah I figured what the heck, and I signed up – I’m now a complete convert. Myspace, Facebook… heck, even my own blog! isn’t as important as Twitter is. It has become the center of my earth and everything else are just moons traveling around to expand the idea. I’m full on with Twitter — BUT, I could walk away tomorrow and not miss it. Because it isn’t ‘life’ – it’s just another something…
I ask this with all sincerity, what is it about Twitter that you find so fascinating? Please give a real example. I can see how real-time search could be huge, but in most instances of actually use, it fails to deliver for me.
So MG you see a world where everybody is on a cell phone or computer 10 seconds of every minute updating Twitter what you want? I mean think about people like Scobel and Kawasaki, these guys spend unreal amounts of time updating Twitter and for what? My question is the same as what dogs Facebook to this day, how will they monetize Twitter? IMO, they should sell while they can before everybody realizes their really isn’t much value in Twitter as anything but amusement and fun voyuerism.
Just for kicks I checked how many articles there were this week with twitter in the title. I thought… It can’t be that many…
- Sobees Latest Horse To Enter The Twitter / Facebook Desktop Client Race
- Nuts: Twitter Inventor About To Launch His Next Project, Code-named Squirrel
- Twitter Is Down: 15 Alternative Things To Do
- Twitter And FriendFeed Battle For Downtime. Scoble’s Head Explodes.
- TwitDoc: Proving That Every File Format Will Eventually Be Shareable Over Twitter
- Search Goes Real-Time With Scoopler. Twitter Dominates Results.
- Twitter reacts to Kindle DX news: Price is an issue
- Twitter Just Made Its Email Notifications Much More Useful
- Mahalo Answers Is Hijacking Twitter Questions From IMshopping
- URL Shortening Wars: Twitter Ditches TinyURL For bit.ly
- Hey @Google – @Twitter To Start Indexing Links For Search
- Twitter Starts To Act Like Apple By Making Life Hard For Developers, Shuts Down StatTweets
- Twitter Mania: Google Got Shut Down. Apple Rumors Heat Up.
- Twishitter: Twitter Apps Head Towards The Gutter
- Showing Its Twitter Envy, Facebook Gets Serious About SMS
- Follow The Money: Bookies Favor Apple For A Twitter Buyout
- Forget Apple, Amazon Should Buy Twitter. Why Not?
And this wasn’t even a whole week. You guys have a good writing team and cover & break a lot of interesting news…
But…it does seem a little heavy on twitter. As one other commentator wrote… If I don’t want to read it hit next. I agree, but the part they missed was that every story about twitter is one less about a startup that could really use the spotlight.
and thats just the ones with twitter in the title, now go count all the articles that talk about twitter while covering something else… its crazy
omg. I knew it was bad, but not that bad……
Twitter is just a lucky start up that recently has a lot of press coverage on it. Yes Twitter is popular but only in United States that has the most coverage. If you ask someone who often tweets in Asia, they will just say NO. But if Facebook, they will say YES. In terms of worldwide usage, I think Facebook beat the hell out of Twitter. The reason why TC always cover Twitter is that the sources of information can be easily found here in US. If you take time to research a little bit more about other non Twitter related startups, I am sure you can writing more interesting articles. Writing only about Twitter will surely decrease the number of TC audience as they can find exactly the same post in anywhere else etc Mashable
“Twitter reacts to Kindle DX news: Price is an issue”
That was such a lame topic. People get fired for less…
It seems that geeky types (and I am one) are often quick to dismiss Twitter because they know that, from a purely technological standpoint, it is hardly a complicated system (or does not appear to be), that could be designed and implemented by a good, small engineering team within a week or so.
But nongeeky types seem to really understand the power of this simple tool to communicate with others, and that is what truly matters. People like Oprah, etc., people who have a lot of influence on many other people (but maybe not on you), so they must know a good thing when they see one.
Also, when I see that the wife of a head of state, like Queen Rania of Jordan, has started tweeting, mixing tweets describing her feelings about the current visit of the Pope (which whom she talked at length) with tweets describing simple facts of life, like having to make a deal with her son so that he will wear a suit to see the Pope, and then later sharing pictures of her husband getting ready to leave their home (OK, it is a palace) for a nice motorcycle ride, I find it pretty astounding. Can anyone imagine a head of state or his/her spouse doing that, thus becoming so accessible (even if only in digital form) to regular Joes and Janes, only ten years ago? That was unthinkable. Say goodbye to the middleman: the tabloids, the magazines, etc. You can hear it directly from the people whom *you* think matter now.
You think that Queen Rania or Oprah or whoever else has nothing interesting to say? Well, do not follow them. You think that articles on Twitter are worthless. Well, do not read them. I think that it is an interesting phenomenon worth following closely.
Well, thats a stupid comment if ever I’ve read one!!
As you correctly state real tech people KNOW there is no REAL value in twitter technology and as this is a TECH blog, then this demographic of readers matter most. It could be argued that people with no interest in technology would not be reading Techcrunch in any case. There are a number of university teams and private companies working on products that WILL shape the way we communicate,work and seek medical attention but none of these companies are ever featured. I suggest keeping an eye on New Scientist and Computer Weekly to get the scoop on technology that really matters; techcrunch is fast becoming a joke in this area. IF I HAD A RIFLE I WOULD SHOOT THAT ANNOYING TWITTER BIRD, ROAST IT, AND FEED IT TO MY DOG!! Maybe then we can all move on and focus on some NEW technology instead of a single hyped up company built on top of technology invented 15+ years ago (TCP IP,Http,DNS,SMS etc). TECHCRUNCH, GET IT TOGETHER OR YOU WILL BEGIN TO LOOSE READERS.
LOL..I love you man!
You had my attention until “LOOSE”.
TechCrunch is not a hardcore tech blog for hardcore nerds. It is very much a blog accessible to the average geek, more about the business and the trends than about hardcore research and technology. There are other outlets to follow the hardcore stuff. I follow many of those and I include TechCrunch into the mix because I have come across interesting news that way, and I like to stay in touch with the general pulse of the world of average geekness. Oh, and I also grab US Weekly once in a while to get a good chuckle out of the Fashion Police. Should US Weekly also change their format to focus only on nerds? Is it all about nerds? Why do some nerds always complain about content instead of acting like true nerds and either removing offending blogs from their list of RSS feeds or just filtering out the posts with offending keywords?
Everything about twitter annonys me.. from the name to the whole keeping people updated on my every move thing, to the term tweets.. the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth..
and that ben stoned dude or whatever his name is. I saw him on colbert report.. he is actually even more annoying then the name twitter..if that was possible
I agree tweeter is big right now, and should be covered… But you guys take that coverage to far…
Its one thing to talk about twitter its another thing to post 4-5 aticles a day about the subject…
It honestly makes me wish their was another site like techcrunch minus all the twitter crap, would switch and never look back.
For all the talk, the value in Twitter rests in the amount of contend each person adds. If people just talk about what they had for dinner, it’s one thing, if a design firm in another country shares recent new posts about what they are working on -it’s information, we might never read about. I love it and encourage pee to add value, not “bulk” to the conversation.
Twitter rocks, but it’s not multimedia. With mirtwitter post your MySpace player embeded on your tweets
@mirpod, in fact I saw your tweet ”Rinôçérose + MySpace player” > http://t.mirpod.com/p/22 : it’s clearly a world wide premiere on twitter.
It’s not just about Twitter, the product, it’s also about Twitter, the idea.
Maybe you could write a little more about Twitter-the-idea rather than Twitter-the-product, then, because from where I’m sitting it’s usually the latter. And when it’s not, it’s Twitter-the-company, which is also not Twitter-the-idea.
As a part-time Twitter-complainer, it really comes down to how much of a particular post (or a proportion of the total) is tantamount to mere gossip. TwitterWag, basically.
Remember when TechCrunch was a leading indicator?
Peeople who are bothered by the high frequency of blog entries about Twitter (oops, sorry, did not mean to mention it) should learn how to filter their RSS feeds to remove those blog entries that could potentially increase their stress level. Filtering a RSS feed is as easy as twittering (oh, shit, did it again, am really sorry).
You should keep writing about Twitter…its simply the only thing that is interesting now.
Virtually acquire twitter and make profit on
http://www.webm...com/twittercom/
One thing that strikes me is how many people STILL don’t understand the importance of Twitter as a change-agent.
Yeah, there’s the communication part of it… that’s a given.
But, what most people still don’t realize is that twitter is actually a search engine.
Companies for years have been trying to find the next “Google-Killer”, but they were looking in the wrong place.
Twitter is an Organic, Semantic, Real-Time search engine. Think about that for a second… you have millions of human spiders, scouring the web 24×7, then report on what is found.
This is only possible because it’s so popular.
It’s so popular, because it’s so simple.
So, keep writing. We’re witnessing something wonderful.
“So popular” becuase of the media and blogs like this are constantly hyping the product. ANY product would do well with that amount of promotion!!
Troy said…
actually a search engine
Nope! I know what search engine is. I do develop algorithms and implement search engine systems that do those things specifically, ie information search & retrieval. There are various domains of search and twitter is no different from systems today that currently do internal site search. I often find comments from people worshipping twitter search engine capabilities as uninformed. You need to understand what search is before making misleading comments. For anyone who is interested in what search engine & information retrieval is about should check the authority on the subjects, such as the popular Springer Information Retrieval journal or the online Internet Mathematics journal. There are also other various journals where cutting-edge of search engine researches are being published. Twitter is no replacement for Google or such as I find uninformed commentators here at TC have been making in the past few months. You need to understand what search is before making misleading comments.
Falafulu: Fine with your definition of search engine…however, did you notice the power of consumerism..! or what they say, “Customer” is the “King”. If a normal not-so-techie guy has started using twitter for search, so be it. Search engine definition as per books might not agree but who cares as the customer is the king, and you might want to include a new definition of search:-)
Twitter might potentially be a search engine, but it’s more of a real time buzz indicator right now. It’s easy for a dancing hippo video to get lots of buzz on if it’s funny enough and thus rank high in twitter fueled search results. Somebody looking to write a paper on hippos will find it utterly useless. Real time search may apply to certain things such as sales coupons, concert tickets etc. For more static information, you need to have much more authoritative search results- pages that have undergone thorough machine and human analysis with criteria such as relevancy, accuracy, timeliness etc.
And with this comment we have what annoys a lot of people about Twitter coverage. It’s not the amount of it–though it is a lot–it’s the overhyping of it. A service that only allows 140 characters hasn’t killed RSS. For all the purported benefits of “real time search” try finding meaningful information during a big event. There’s far too much noise. Try finding information about, say, the population of Mozambique.
Twitter’s fun and occasionally useful. But it’s not the end-all, be-all that Twitter fanatics sometimes make it out to be.
Fuck you Troy. Fuck you. If I saw you in person I would smash your face in, but than again maybe Im drunk.
I am tired of twitter what are you doing right now! Im gonna smash your face in troy even if Im drunk.
Twitter is the next myspace, what am I doing right now? smashing troys face in!
this mofo has shares in twitter. Thats why he’s always talking about this shit.
99.99999999% of this world dont care about twitter.
Fuck twitter !
Fuck twitter users !
Fuck twitter creators !
and fuck techcrunches non stop coverage…
It reminds me when it snows in Portland, (a couple of inches” and its Winter Storm coverage non stop, thats all they talk about 2 inches of fucking snow…
Techcrunch is becoming less about tech startups and more and more main stream cover what every one else is covering every day…
Great article, I really enjoyed reading it.
worth writing, just for right now? How about forever? Twitter is not going anywhere. I dedicate the whole blog to twitter and still am not able to touch 1% stuff going around its world, in fact, twitter is becoming core part of information world.
such a core part no one will bother reading your blog