I have been a big fan of Twitter.com after I finally started using it many months ago and it seems like everybody uses it, even big companies promote their pages on Twitter and Facebook on TV.
It seems that Facebook.com and Twitter.com almost always go hand in hand when websites promote their social networking pages.
One thing about Twitter, is that it seems to me they have maxed out already and some people may even be leaving (not using) the site! Why after so much love by everybody, that it seems Twitter is in trouble?
Downtime
It seems that the site is down so much, it is crazy! I really do not visit the site all that often but a lot of the times I do try to visit, I get to see the whale they always display saying the site is over capacity!
Spam
I get tons of requests every day to follow people, but the vast majority are all spam related posts that do me little to no good! It is often hard to detect who is good to follow and who is not.
Auto Direct Messages
These things suck and it is mainly because Twitter doesn’t allow a bulk delete function. If you happen to approve somebody to follow and they are of the spammy type, you will almost instantly get a Direct Message (DM) from them. Again, this is like your email box filling up with spam emails, all pushing some glorified product or how they made so much money doing X.
Since Twitter keeps allowing these Auto DM’s and doesn’t even offer a bulk delete function.. these get annoying very fast.
Reply
If somebody replies to a tweet you made or you reply to a tweet somebody else made… there is no function or text to know what the person is replying back to you about! Getting the reply will most of the time leave you in the dark on what the person is replying to you about. This makes the service very frustrating.
Outside Apps and Tools
Twitter opened their API up pretty quickly. Everyday different tools and services become available to work with Twitter. This is often good but many of these services allow for easy spamming. These tools almost always have a good side to them but people find out ways to use the good and turn them into not so good things. Auto Direct Messages is a good example.
IMO, Twitter should of sold when they had the chance! I think Twitter is going to lose popularity and slowly fade into the sunset unless a lot of positive changes take place.
Facebook.com on the other hand keeps growing! I think the biggest reason for this is because it is not Spammy! You get the function of Twitter without the spam. Don’t get me wrong, FB has it’s issues as well but nothing like Twitter.
Only time will tell with what happens to Twitter, but changes are needed!
On every thing you note above about Twitter – DITTO!!
Who-TF is going to read the tweets of 2-3-4000 followers?? 99.5% are buried in ‘past tweets’ that won’t be read anyways! (Unless one ‘twitters’ 24/7!!) And if something ‘big’ happens, the whole ‘twitter universe’ tweets the same thing for hours! Good grief! The bigger Twitter gets, to me, the less relevent, and more confusing it’ll become. Basically, my opinion of it now!
October 16th, 2009