A conversation: Should Twitter be trying to be Facebook?
Sometimes I have email conversations (or IM or text or GASP live conversations) with people and I think afterwards, “now THAT should be a blog post”. So here is a recent chat about Twitter and what it should and shouldn’t be, and whether or not it should be worrying about marketing to Millennials. Only change I made was the email addresses for Twitter ID’s ;)
The conversation
@shabernator: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10265060-2.html?tag=mncol;title
@thejdrewfeldman: Thanks! Cool article, but I think that people who take the viewpoint that Twitter is solely a constant-status-updating attention-starved craze are missing some of the major benefits and uses of Twitter. And they probably didn’t use it for too long before coming to a conclusion :)
@jeffhilimire: My correlation is in 1995, most people thought email was about sending jokes around.
@shabernator: I think its interesting to think of it from the Gen Y perspective… how can twitter make them feel unique?
“For the Millennials to make the move, Twitter will have to find a way to integrate the self-branding features MySpace gave birth to and Facebook nurtured. Even if they’re packaged in 140 characters or less.”
@jeffhilimire: I think its interesting, but Twitter just isn’t about that for me. It’s completely different in almost every way than Facebook and MySpace.
My opinion is, people that don’t understand Twitter feel like it has to copy those social networks to be successful. I’m more of the viewpoint that Twitter isn’t supposed to be the size of Facebook or MySpace, its not your social world all wrapped up in a nice package like Facebook is. It’s a new way to communicate, not a new social network.
If Twitter wants mass adoption and global domination, perhaps it needs to shift what its doing. But just the same way that we’d never sit here and say “for wiki’s to reach Millennials they need to be more like full functioning intranets”, we shouldn’t do the same thing to Twitter. Wiki’s have their place and I think Twitter has its place too, though it might not be what we all think it should be.
Also, I’m about to blog this conversation ;)
