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Myrlit

Is Twitter the next Second Life? Second Life

News submitted by myrl 22 Dec 08

by Sean Carton [Clickz]

I’m sorry if I’m about to offend all you dedicated Twitter fanatics out there, but (in the spirit of the holidays) I’m just a big old Scrooge. Articles about Twittering for business make me want to shout “Bah humbug!” and turn off my computer so I can run screaming into the night.

For the past year or so I’ve kept silent on this issue, but it now seems like there’s an extraordinary parallel between the hype about using Twitter for business and the hype about Second Life and other now-embarrassing fads in the online press.

Remember Second Life? Lots of companies spent big bucks setting up their own islands in the 3-D virtual world so they could do virtual business and rake in the cash. Unfortunately, between protestors who didn’t like their chat room sullied with filthy lucre and commercial interests and the sad fact that there’s a huge gap between the number of registered users on the site and the number of people who actually use it on a regular basis. Though Second Life seemed like the next big thing, most people who registered for the service used it only once or twice.

It seems the Twitter user gap is pretty large, too. While there are millions of registered users on the service, there are only about 200,000 active users each week sending about 3 million tweets per day, or 21 million tweets per week. Sure they like making themselves heard (those statistics average out to 105 tweets per active user!), but who are they talking to?

Based on Quantcast stats, they’re mainly talking to other young, white, or Asian folks with lots of education, no children, and not a lot of income. That’s not a totally fair statement though. There’s a fairly large chunk of Twitter users in the $100,000-plus household income range. They just don’t seem to be the norm.

And according to these same Quantcast numbers, the vast majority of the audience (74 percent) are passersby who don’t spend much time on the service. Only 1 percent are addicts, who make up a whopping 34 percent of all the visits to the service.

There’s no doubt that a lot of people like Twitter and even stop by and check things out once in a while. And there’s certainly no doubt that a lot of Twitterers spend an inordinate amount of time on the service. But as for using Twitter as a business tool, especially if you’re not in an Internet-related business? I don’t think so.

Why? Because those 200,000 active users make up just 0.07 percent of the total U.S. population. Twitter might be all the rage among the technorati with lots of time on their hands, but most consumers don’t give a tweet about the service.

Sure, many in the online business press have gotten pretty jacked up about the ability to send short messages about the state of their meals or what airport they happen to be stuck in (and have even put together some pretty funny parodies about the service), but statistics show that if you’re in a business that’s not targeted at the young/hip/bored/student demographic, Twitter probably won’t mean tweet when it comes to helping your business.

Worse than that, it might make you look like you’ve got too much time on your hands. As a colleague of mine pointed out in June, if my PR person (whom I’m paying by the hour, by the way) was Tweeting all day long, I’d wonder why the heck he wasn’t actually out there working for me. It’s kind of like the guy who sends all the “nifty links” at your office: at one time it may have made him look like he had his finger on the pulse of the Internet, but now it just broadcasts the fact that he doesn’t have much to do.

Look, I obviously have no problem with technology. And yeah, I’m definitely an early adopter and probably a prime target for Twitter. But I’ve also been around long enough to recognize that hype doesn’t equal useful when it comes to applying a new technology.

Don’t forget, the people writing most of the glowing reviews about Twitter are probably its most avid users and are therefore part of a hermetically sealed group that lacks perspective. People who write about technology online are paid (well, “paid” might sometimes be a relative term) to write about online technology and to be the first to use it. Pumping a new technology makes them look smarter and raises their street cred because it gets others to use it and makes them (and I’ll even include myself in the “them” here) look like they got the scoop before everyone else.

Unfortunately, numbers don’t lie. While Twitter might be a great way for a small group of folks to pass notes back and forth to each other, it’s hardly the next big thing when it comes to building your business online or promoting your company, unless your company sells to the people who use Twitter.

Heck, going by the numbers, Internet meme-generating chat board 4chan has more regular users and a larger audience. However, I’ve yet to see any business magazine write about it as “the next big way to build relationships with your customers.”

Don’t believe the hype.

5 comments so far:

myrl 2 years ago:

what do you think about this? especially the stats about twitter users…

Sven Neumann 2 years ago:

agree

Lila Mill 2 years ago:

I joined Twitter for two reasons, typically me, I joined with two personas too, meaning two accounts. One reason, was to find likeminded people, so I created an account for me. That worked fine. I didn’t get any close friends, but I don’t suppose that’s the reason for Twitter. We do share ideas and information and for that it’s great.

The other reason, was the business hype thingy. I thought I could use Twitter to marketing my SL business so I created a Twitter account for Lila. It didn’t work out that way. I hated the constant tweets about new products from the ones I followed so I never used the account for that. I unfollowed the commercial Twitter accounts, but hey, if it works for them, that’s good.

I good friend of mine use Twitter for networking. He sends out a question and only a short time after, he gets the answer he wants. I have never been able to use it like that myself, but I guess it has to do with the individual and his or hers ability to network.

Have you thought about that the “nifty links” guy might actually be networking? And is collecting info to make him a better employee? Of course the “nifty links” guy might just be bored. The fact is, that I’ve been changing my mind about Twitter during the time I’ve been using it.

keo zapatero 9 month ago:

Proposition 17.

In the field of the Odyssey as the Ulysses of Homer born of the surf of the sea symbolising man with the thousand ideas and written in the dynamics of the tropical waves episode open to the sky of adventure, carnal links, knightly combats, the hero is only free in the epics of virile action, the great nomadic wanderings. In contrast, the field of the analyst is an interior world with an economy of words, availability in a sedentary empty theatre like an inner oasis.

Proposition 18.

If poetry is a language in the highest meaning of the word, it is because it is the knot, the furnace, the vortex of logopeïa (significance of the woe in the highest meaning of the word, it is because it is the knot, the furnace, the vortex of logopeïa (significance of the word), phalopoeïa (originality of the image) and finally of meloeïa (assonance of sounds). It is this later quality which is rare as we can also imagine in the analyst with a difference: the poet perceives the “hymn of the world” and the analyst, the secret mechanism of the unconscious, the interior path of man.

Proposition 19.

If the poet lives the anxiety of the blank sheet and the analyst the ruin of an empty consulting room, it is because both live up to their art as an armrest for their solitude and not as an awakening of thought.

Appendix 1.

The word solitude and its concept occur episodically in these propositions because they are intimately linked to poetry, but, I am not really sure that “the solitude of the poet” is a form of punishment. If one “enters into solitude”, it is no sacrifice, no calling,. On the contrary, its quintessence is Awakening, as in a Spanish inn for the pilgrim, the cure for a patient; it offers what one possesses in reality: The LIVED EXPERIENCE, as in life, we do not suffer from what we have brought rather from what we have been unable to give. There is slightly nothing to negotiate nor to expire above all no nostalgia of solitude. Of course, most need solitude to produce a work “One must get lost within oneself” (F. Kafka) and it is difficult to outline the limits, often extraordinary indifferent. They lose themselves probably because they have gone beyond on the quest believing themselves to have a mission and a grossly useless one at that. There is never a mandate. Rimbaud for sure had fully understood this (in Abyssinia), he had certainly gone beyond an art that he had fully circumscribed, a meteor in the matrix of the poet to come, he had therefore nothing more to prove: what is definite even in excess is not to be crossed out, is not to be started again. He had given too much too quickly, too far, the gap between the Verb and existence is neither an abyss nor a ruin, but simply a lived experience, the equinox of a dreaming mind.

Appendix 2.

Poets apart from a fether an abyss nor a ruin, but simply a lived experience, the equinox of a dreaming mind.

Appendix 3.

Poets apart from a few symbolists have no curiosity for the abysses. Psychoanalysis would worry about its genesis and would guide the subject out of the abyss whilst cornering him in his last defences, his uttermost confessions. The patient must therefore verbalise and go beyond his limits expressing unspeakable shame striving to live and live again that which has changed his entire life, his entire being reduced to the obsessional reflection of a trauma. His only life belt in the tempest is the psychoanalyst for sure who in the torment sets his patient adrift on the high seas, at the profoundest depths. Is metamorphosis now necessary, to displace the obsession, the fixed idea enhancing it with new colors. Here is an alchemy of the deepest wound treated with all the seriousness of men of science. The psychoanalyst does not quibble with Satan, the Satan of his patients, hence a terrible harshness, a perfect austerity as he locks himself in the fantasies of his patient like a mother embracing her cancerous son to take his illness from him and restore his hope in life.

Appendix 4.

Poets are major, fully acknowledged or meteors, never prophetic.The advent of the Nazism was due in Germany to a need for a great spiritual leader, a sort of shepherd of the Germanic Soul. He was awaited in the work of the Romantics. Alas, the promised heaven turned into an apocalypse, the great leader into a bloodthirsty barbarian in the black masses of the holocausts.

Appendix 5.

Amongst the poets in love with a mythology linked to the elements, the most subtle are those who deal with minerals.

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