Robert Scoble is the one single person who put Twitter on the map. His evangelizing from SXSW a couple of years ago created the buzz. Over the past year or so, he has switched to FriendFeed. Now, he just went back to his blog. Here’s his blog post about problems with Twitter. Here’s a response from Dave Winer (father of blogging).
Like Scoble, I followed everyone who followed me (well, almost, there were the porn “girls” sites that I ignored). But most of my followers were self-proclaimed marketing gurus in “social media” or “search engine optimization.” They were just trying to get more followers. To me, it’s not the number of followers, but who they are. Take a look at any public Twitter site and you can see who’s following. A quick scan is revealing.
I’ve been using Twitter for conversations among people I know. Some point to links to things of interest to me–that’s OK. But many are blatantly self-promotional. Or are simply links designed to drive page view numbers. The best use of Twitter was by a guy at a cable company who decided to monitor it for complaints about his company, then do something about it. I haven’t heard of any other company doing that, but I hope many do. Otherwise, I’m not sure. Twitter is not an open platform, and the recent demise of URL shortener tr.im reveals additional problems with the Twitter trustworthiness.
