Friday, April 17, 2009

April 17th 2009 the day in my opinion Twitter dies.

Some readers here may not be aware that the rejuvenation of this blog all came from one place and has been made up by people who share one very common interest, Twitter.

For those of you reading who don't know what twitter is, I am amazed. Now when I started in 2007 on twitter I did not get it but it has evolved in something fantastic but alongside this evolution has come all sorts of problems.

When I began on twitter there was only a handful of people using it, Facebook was still the big thing. Trying to explain what it was all about was equally as hard, "its like facebook status updates", "yeah I am following people and they are following me back" the amount of times people laughed at me and told me there was no future in twitter, was huge.

Well all that has changed every Tom, Dick and Harry has found themselves on twitter. Stephen Fry was one of the very first celebrities to pick up on the value of twitter, he amassed a huge following and also followed everyone back engaging with people as much as he could. It was incredible for us ordinary Joes to gain an insight into his day.

But of course this became the trendy thing to do. Celebs found out about twitter and they started to join up in their droves. Jonathon Ross, Philip Schofield, Mc Hammer, Shaquile O Neal, Russel Brand the list goes on and on and on. The difference with a lot of these guys compared to Stephen Fry was that they did not communicate as much with the community. They did not understand twitter the way early adopter Stephen Fry did.

With this onslaught of celebrity talking about twitter at every available opportunity, twitter was now mainstream and its growth was phenomenal, over the last 6 months twitter has struggled with this growth. Just last night Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to see who could hit 1 million followers first and the winner would donate 10000 mosquito nets to underdeveloped countries. This brought twitter to its knees last night, ruining many a folks evening, making tweeting impossible, all to boost their egos! The sickening thing is that this was a top news story for CNN, like come on, fuck off.

Today though I am fearing the worst for twitter, Oprah will have Evan Williams and Biz Stone the co founders on as guests, aswell as Mr ego himself Ashton. She will also be putting her first tweet live on the show! WOW

At present Oprahs account which was set up yesterday has over 70000 people following it even though she has not typed one word. I feel though today when she eventually decides to write some useless 140 character message like "hello im Oprah" or "testing this twitter thing out" Twitter will finally collapse.

Over the past month and and half every evening at 6pm GMT, a lag appears where tweets are updating sometimes 30 minutes or more behind. With this sort of ego coming on stream and with the power she has over so many millions of Americans I am dreading the thoughts of what sort of lag times we will have to deal with.

This though, could be the final nail in the coffin that I need to see to get me away from twitter, it will be emotional to leave now, but come on the machine for once aint growing as fast as the humans this time.

13 comments:

  1. I am a fairly new user (6 months) and I can see the changes with the celebs and I guess they would be called power users? It gives a whole different tone and feel to it, not to mention the nearly constant fails of even trying to log in. Good in a way for me as I was spending too much time here, but frustration none the less. I don't see oprah and her minions being long time users ,some but certainly not all. I don't understand these people who just want to make it a numbers game, why bother?

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  2. Unrealted to your post, but I have a twitter related question. I see some of us use our twitter names here amnd some don't. What if any is the advantage of doing it one way over the other? I know I personally use a lot of diff names all over the net. I like to keep somethings seperate, and thats really the only way I see of doing it.

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  3. Well I was close!

    Oprahs first tweet at 3:10 GMT was actually

    "HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY ."

    Yes all caps and strange use of breakspace. The other thing is twitter has slowed down on the web in relation to the web page opening so far no sign of lag yet! but give it time.

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  4. Yes well spotted I suppose 4nine£ started where no one knew each other and we all went under pseudonyms, some people have decided to do the same now. That choice is entirely up to the contributer.

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  5. I have tried to tweet about 8 times on the web page today, 2 got through but this has been happening for a couple weeks now. Takes the fun out of it.

    As for oprah hopefully she will bore of it quickly, of course then gayle might take over and she might be a chatterbox

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  6. Shan we need to go somewhere else for our microblogging needs. What about identi.ca or plurk.com or yammer.com?

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  7. how about just giving the poor people of Africa the nets anyway without shouting about it on twitter or tweet once and then thats it?

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  8. Last night i nearly threw the computer out the window tweets were way behind .

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  9. Oh stop being a snob!

    So what if Ashton Kutcher doesn't follow people back or if there's a big hoo-ha with CNN to race to a million followers. If it doesn't interest you, don't follow those accounts.

    Sure, Twitter is experiencing some technical problems because it's in an intense growth period, but that's only going to work in favour for ALL Twitter users in the long run, as it gives them more clout to improve their service.

    Give up on the elitist attitude and use the function of the un-follow.

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  10. God listen to you Sleepy, maybe its time you woke up and read the post correctly, there is nothing elitist about it at all.

    Some technical problems??? what fucking planet are you on its a daily occurance, and I dont follow celebs at all so again another totally unsubstantiated comment.

    It makes no difference if I follow them or not but the other night that stupid fucking race to 1 million killed twitter as many of the comments here and on many other blogs will verify.

    So apologys if you found my post elitist but in future read the fucking post properly before you decide to comment.

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  11. LOL Sleepydumpling, throwing around the world elitist, when you obviously haven't read the post properly.

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  12. Shan - that drives me mad hearing about Ashton whatshisface and the ego races crashing twitter. It's been a disaster that last few weeks. Every few nights when I get a good go at twitter it'll be the night it's all crashed and nothings happening. Pain. The celebs aren't worth that.

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  13. I am, I'm a celebrity follow me, well I am in my house anyway I follow Celebrities I hold my hand up i must admit i do but then i also follow about a trillion non celebs too

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