Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Twitter and Facebook - because feed readers didn't make it

I've been a Twitter value skeptic as noted in Explaining twitter and CB Redux, but the world is not cooperating.

Communications, especially corporate communications, that once would have gone to blogs are going to twitter. At the same time desktop feed readers are dead but Facebook is very popular.

Both Twitter and Facebook use subscription technology (feeds), but they're quite different from the persistent world of the blog post. Importantly, a single tool is used for both authoring feed items and consuming them.

The blog/feed paradigm, I fear, didn't quite cross the cultural chasm. The technology got stuck with the geek elite, which is not a happy place to be. Maybe there were just too many moving pieces ...

So we're taking a diversion. I don't think it's the right way to go, but this isn't the first time I've seen this play. I hope I'm wrong.

If we do wander the Twitter back roads, it won't be a permanent diversion. Sooner or later, in a slightly different form, we'll return to persistent, open ended, indexed, document like artifacts with feeds ...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You took the words right out of my mouth. Also, twitter always appeared to me to be a well, a twitter!

High pitched and far removed from lets say a black-birds song.

The emphasis on "twitter" high pitched, nervous and excited always planted in me the thought that the medium is just not very usable for anything of substance!

And that was never sufficient enough to push me over my un-geek elite-ness block!

Cheers, alan