Sam's World Of No

So, all of a sudden, we’re all addicted to Twitter. I can follow my favourite female singers, have ladies who like to lounge in their underwear follow me. I can bitch about a company and all of a sudden their customer experience manager is on my case, trying like hell to sort my problem out so I tweet about how good their service is. And this is great – I get my problem sorted quicker.

It’s fair to say that Twitter’s influence is, in some spheres, pretty large. TechCrunch gets more traffic from Twitter than from Digg. That’s pretty impressive, considering the amount of time that people still spend gaming Digg. But its influence is still pretty limited. As a rule, it’s still fairly restricted to the technology industry. It’s not that easy to use, and as replies, retweets and hashtags take over, it’s becoming more and more like a raw message format than something that’s human readable. URL shortening services are hardly accessible to the lay person.

I think we’ve all tried to explain what twitter is to a friend, even a tech-savvy one. Perhaps we’ve got as far as getting them signed up and an iPhone client downloaded. Three months later, they haven’t updated it. They don’t understand what it’s for, and they don’t have any followers. People who abandoned MySpace and Bebo for Facebook  in a heartbeat are not migrating to Twitter in the same way.

Twitter is still a niche product. So, if it does become the ‘pulse of the planet‘, is its current utility as a community management/traffic driving/networking/brand management/corporate communications/customer service tool going to be limited? I think it might be.

I follow 119 people – and something like 20 of these tweet on any sort of regular basis. Even that is a bit much. I had to unfollow Jonathan Ross and Zeldman; I couldn’t hack it. More than 20 new tweets in an hour and I’m screwed. How am I going to cope if every tweet that mentions a company has an @reply from that company’s community management being dead helpful? I’m not. If there a billion people on twitter, I’ll be swamped and I’ll have to leave.

More to the point, how am I going to get that personalised service if said community managers are inundated because there are a billion people on twitter? Think of the companies with REALLY dreadful customer service, like O2 and BT. How are they going to keep up with the moaning? They couldn’t, unless the metric/filtering stuff gets really clever. So there goes my personal service.

So perhaps we should view the current state of Twitter as a VIP customer service and get-satisfaction-esque issue resolution tool available to geeks who can understand it. Will every moan and question get dealt with if the user base multiplies? No, unless the very basis of the whole idea changes. There’s a reason that all of these companies have taken their phone numbers of their sites and instead installed automated customer service systems/mantraps – individual interaction with the whole customer base just isn’t possible.

Will Dell be able to post and get a conversion on real-time offers of limited product lines/refurb products, if the user base was massively bigger? Not under the current model – the offers would be snapped up so quickly that people would stop bothering to click on the links.

What of real time web? What of it. Whilst aggregating tweets is a good way to find out news really quickly, it’s a job for a computer, not a person. I can’t have more than one or two ‘news’ (be it world affairs, the BBC or something on formula 1) users in my follow list; anything more is information overload. I rely on power users to filter the real time web down for me, again in real time, so that it’s just enough information to digest.

So perhaps the future of Twitter under the current model is stronger groups/networks that are reliant on real-world connections, mixed with a lot less business interaction and a selection of a very few, very important, power users.

Sounds like a pretty shaky business idea to me. No doubt, I’ll be proven wrong.

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