No doubt and doubt on Twitter Phenomenon

The first day on SES New York, I listened the opening keynote from Kawaski and five panels: “SEO: Where to Next?”, “Key Points in launching a global website”, “Pay Per Conversation”, “The Imperative: Successful Site Architeture”, and “Getting mobilized! Mobile Marketing Strategies”. I admit that Kawaski’s keynote is the best but a lot of questions raised in my mind after his speech.

No doubt, Twitter is a huge phenomenon now. Its traffic growth is tremendous and anything related to twitter is just a hot topic. Everyday I see at least 5 posts or buzz from about 20 SEO blogs or news sites. It somehow makes me tired and sick.

No doubt, Kawaski is a big fan and loyal supporter of Twitter. He is aggressively using this tool to build up his own personal brand name and promote his online business property.

No doubt, Kawaski’s speech has rich information and lots of tricks on how to utilize Twitter for marketing purpose. Basically, he told us to get as many followers as possible, to auto-follow your followers, tweet anything that your followers may be interested, monitor your brand names, retweet popular topics, copy other successful twitter accounts’ strategy, and so on. Some useful twitter applications or websites he mentioned are: retweetist.com, twitalyzer.com, adjix.com, twibs.com, tynt.com, twitterhawk.com, etc.

However, his approach on Twitter gave me second thoughts on Twitter.

First, he claimed that Twitter is a great tool. I can’t deny this, but is it really that great? Are we too enthusiastic on its greatness? I think the fundamental of Twitter is a convenient and combined interface of SMS and IM. The creativeness and uniqueness is how it allows you do micro-blogging to a huge audience but avoids spamming. Why? It’s your control to follow or unfollow anyone, and your control to read or ignore any tweet from people you follow. But is there any significant technical hurdles to prevent another player with enough cash stepping in? Twitter is no way like Google who can keep its competitive advantages with its unique and patented searching algorithms.

Second, is Twitter itself a good enough micro-blogging tool? My opinion is no. The current twitter phenomenon is more like a brand bubble than a significant break. The usefulness of Twitter heavily relies on those applications and third-party sites powered by twitter’s API. The existence of those applications and sites is beautiful but also exposes Twitter’s lack of functionality. Compared to the creativeness and hardworking of those outside developers, the well-funded twitter team seems doing nothing impressive. I still have trouble to upload image to my profile. I can’t sort or search my followers or their tweets directly on twitter. There is no option to follow or unfollow multiple users at one time. The interface design is still the same as long time ago. For me, Twitter is just taking all credits from its developers and sitting on the top of millions of dollars venture capital.

Third, how can we measure the reception of Twitter? I guess it is very low. Yes, people are following. But more likely most people just keep talking to themselves and hoping followers will pick up whatever they drop. Even you see conversations, if you don’t know others personally, responses you get may be just crap. Kawaski is a perfect example here. He uses a tool to auto follow his followers, hires people to tweet for him, tweets anything he finds on StumpleUpon or Alltop by randomly browsing, and even pays a site to search tweets by keywords and then send responses with threads from StumpleUpon or Alltop. Is this what we initially intended to do with Twitter. I thought it should be a place to share real thought and personal experiences with people like you. Is Kawaski’s twitter account still himself? How many tweets there are really from his deep heart? Is it still valuable for us to follow? Furthermore, how many people outside there are doing the same thing on Twitter? If you see a celebrity tweets a lot everyday on twitter, ask yourself: is it really him or her saying so? Does he or she have so much time to do this? Am I just fooled by those rich guys?

I am not against Twitter. I have my own Twitter account and manage a company Twitter account. But what I see is different from what most people say about Twitter. I just think we should calm down and really think how we should use Twitter in the right way and how to improve this tool so that it can last longer and create more value for most of us.