twitter
FileSocial risks being antisocial
26/08/09 09:06
First some good news: you can now share virtually
anything through Twitter. Thanks to the efforts of
Shea Bennett and the Twittercism blog i’ve
been alerted to this new Filesocial thing that lets
you upload stuff, link it to your Twitter
account and Tweet it all over the place.
Shea has his reservations because of the ease with which people will be able to share bad stuff. Malware, porn, race hate files, you’ll be able to share that just as easily as any of the genuinely interesting stuff people are wont to show others using the network. Personally I’m less concerned about that; we all get time-wasting and inappropriate emails, it was going to happen on Twitter one day, we’ll deal with it.
No, I’m concerned on two fronts. First, Twitter’s great selling point has always been its simplicity - there’s an announcement, maybe a link, you have to be brief and you can chat and reply a bit. That’s it. I love the fact that a five year old could handle the basic idea. Add files in, then maybe later a bit of file transfer, and it starts to look like something else. This might not matter to many people and I could so easily be wrong, but abandon the simplicity of Twitter and for many people I suspect you’ll be abandoning its prime usefulness.
Second, it’s another step towards everyone expecting everything free of charge. I have no idea how the Filesocial people are going to make this pay. That’s their business and not mine of course, but like YouTube which currently doesn’t pay its way and so many other social networking ideas, there is no proven financial model that makes this sustainable as yet. I’ll be delighted when such a model emerges, but in the meantime do excuse my being a bit of a curmudgeon - I’m looking at this and many other things as free only temporarily. When it’s clear whether I’m going to have to pay or accept loads of advertising on my site or whatever then I’ll be in a position to evaluate whether I want to use them in the longer term.
Shea has his reservations because of the ease with which people will be able to share bad stuff. Malware, porn, race hate files, you’ll be able to share that just as easily as any of the genuinely interesting stuff people are wont to show others using the network. Personally I’m less concerned about that; we all get time-wasting and inappropriate emails, it was going to happen on Twitter one day, we’ll deal with it.
No, I’m concerned on two fronts. First, Twitter’s great selling point has always been its simplicity - there’s an announcement, maybe a link, you have to be brief and you can chat and reply a bit. That’s it. I love the fact that a five year old could handle the basic idea. Add files in, then maybe later a bit of file transfer, and it starts to look like something else. This might not matter to many people and I could so easily be wrong, but abandon the simplicity of Twitter and for many people I suspect you’ll be abandoning its prime usefulness.
Second, it’s another step towards everyone expecting everything free of charge. I have no idea how the Filesocial people are going to make this pay. That’s their business and not mine of course, but like YouTube which currently doesn’t pay its way and so many other social networking ideas, there is no proven financial model that makes this sustainable as yet. I’ll be delighted when such a model emerges, but in the meantime do excuse my being a bit of a curmudgeon - I’m looking at this and many other things as free only temporarily. When it’s clear whether I’m going to have to pay or accept loads of advertising on my site or whatever then I’ll be in a position to evaluate whether I want to use them in the longer term.
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Twitter aren't the bad guys
14/05/09 09:09
Well, that was probably Twitter’s worst day so
far. The hour or so’s outage in the
evening we could understand but the idea that we
couldn’t use the system as we’d done
so far was too much for some people.
OK, you might not have seen it. To explain briefly: at the moment, if you reply to someone’s Tweet, they see your response whether they’re following you or not. Yesterday Twitter announced it would stop this happening unless they were following you - so if the first word of one of my Tweets was @stephenfry (to use a very famous example) he would see it but if he replied to me then nobody who wasn’t following me would see it. The @ signifies the message is directed to him.
Mr. Fry’s followers might well be mightily relieved at this, but celebrities aside there were a lot of objections. Suppose someone needed help with a bit of information and you were able to respond with something that would be useful to many people? Unless your addressee’s follower happened to be following you they would no longer see it. They’d miss stuff, the banter, the information, for many the whole point of being on Twitter.
Later in the day it transpired that the tweak was because the existing model wasn’t particularly scalable. So they issued a cover story about making life easier for users when it wasn’t about any such thing. That’s a bit naughty.
The real issue that came out, though, was about the anger of Twitter customers when they found they were being told about a change to the system that they didn’t much like. There was fury, a while stream of messages with the Twitterfail tag emerged - and all because people didn’t like a change Twitter had made.
Twitter’s decision to fudge the reasons for the change was of course a mistake. Never, ever talk down to your customers. I can’t help but feel, however, that a lot of users have missed a very important point about Twitter, same as the Facebook customers missed a couple of months back when it changed its interface.
It doesn’t belong to us. It’s someone else’s playground and they’re allowing us to play in it.
This is a bit of a tough message. It appears to go against the idea of social networking, of sharing, The fact is, however, that Twitter is a private company owned by its founders. Its value is of course in its ability to open itself up to others, which can lead to the illusion that it’s somehow ‘ours’ and that we can complain when it changes in a way we don’t like or of which we don’t approve. But in reality we can’t. We’re there by someone else’s invitation. We’re not even paying customers.
Of course, the wise owner will listen to his or her non-paying guests and won’t want to risk destroying their newly-valuable (they hope) piece of virtual real estate by angering them. Nonetheless the sheer anger, the irritation with the fact of being unable to control everything that happened on Twitter, that we witnessed yesterday looks a little misplaced to me. Biz Stone and his colleagues own Twitter and they let everyone else play with it. They may have been clumsy, they may have gone against what some people think they ought to be doing, but they’re honestly not the bad guys. They’re the little guys trying to make a little application serve the whole world. I don’t know them and this is pure speculation, but it could be that yesterday they started to feel a little overwhelmed by all this.
OK, you might not have seen it. To explain briefly: at the moment, if you reply to someone’s Tweet, they see your response whether they’re following you or not. Yesterday Twitter announced it would stop this happening unless they were following you - so if the first word of one of my Tweets was @stephenfry (to use a very famous example) he would see it but if he replied to me then nobody who wasn’t following me would see it. The @ signifies the message is directed to him.
Mr. Fry’s followers might well be mightily relieved at this, but celebrities aside there were a lot of objections. Suppose someone needed help with a bit of information and you were able to respond with something that would be useful to many people? Unless your addressee’s follower happened to be following you they would no longer see it. They’d miss stuff, the banter, the information, for many the whole point of being on Twitter.
Later in the day it transpired that the tweak was because the existing model wasn’t particularly scalable. So they issued a cover story about making life easier for users when it wasn’t about any such thing. That’s a bit naughty.
The real issue that came out, though, was about the anger of Twitter customers when they found they were being told about a change to the system that they didn’t much like. There was fury, a while stream of messages with the Twitterfail tag emerged - and all because people didn’t like a change Twitter had made.
Twitter’s decision to fudge the reasons for the change was of course a mistake. Never, ever talk down to your customers. I can’t help but feel, however, that a lot of users have missed a very important point about Twitter, same as the Facebook customers missed a couple of months back when it changed its interface.
It doesn’t belong to us. It’s someone else’s playground and they’re allowing us to play in it.
This is a bit of a tough message. It appears to go against the idea of social networking, of sharing, The fact is, however, that Twitter is a private company owned by its founders. Its value is of course in its ability to open itself up to others, which can lead to the illusion that it’s somehow ‘ours’ and that we can complain when it changes in a way we don’t like or of which we don’t approve. But in reality we can’t. We’re there by someone else’s invitation. We’re not even paying customers.
Of course, the wise owner will listen to his or her non-paying guests and won’t want to risk destroying their newly-valuable (they hope) piece of virtual real estate by angering them. Nonetheless the sheer anger, the irritation with the fact of being unable to control everything that happened on Twitter, that we witnessed yesterday looks a little misplaced to me. Biz Stone and his colleagues own Twitter and they let everyone else play with it. They may have been clumsy, they may have gone against what some people think they ought to be doing, but they’re honestly not the bad guys. They’re the little guys trying to make a little application serve the whole world. I don’t know them and this is pure speculation, but it could be that yesterday they started to feel a little overwhelmed by all this.