Twitter: Too Much of a Good Thing?

Has Twit­ter reached its peak of suc­cess, and is it head­ing now for the trough of dis­con­tent? Has it been over-hyped? I find myself won­der­ing.

Pos­si­ble signs of trou­ble:

• The site has been too busy of late — I’ve been unable to com­plete tasks because their server was too busy. That dis­cour­ages me from return­ing.
• Twit­ter is now serv­ing as a vec­tor for a worm. As a result one of my clients’ IT depart­ment is now block­ing access to Twit­ter from cor­po­rate PCs and lap­tops until they’ve fig­ured out how to pro­tect employ­ees from the mal­ware deliv­ered via Twit­ter.
• Its search capa­bil­i­ties are too lim­ited when it comes to try­ing to find peo­ple with very com­mon names. (I have much bet­ter luck with LinkedIn.)
• It’s not easy to sort the good stuff from the ran­dom tweets that are just annoy­ing…

I under­stand that a lot of well-respected pun­dits and media out­lets are pre­dict­ing it will be the next “killer app,” but I’m not yet con­vinced. Yes, I’m def­i­nitely a new­bie when it comes to Twit­ter — but I’d far rather talk to friends and fam­ily by phone or in per­son…

I can see its ben­e­fit for per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tions among friends and fam­ily, but as a busi­ness vehi­cle, where’s the value beyond short and sweet com­mu­ni­ca­tions?

Because so many tweets are writ­ten in SMS-like short­hand, I ques­tion the value of mon­i­tor­ing tweets for brand per­cep­tions… It’s likely to take a lot of labor-inten­sive human analy­sis to get much value out of the sen­ti­ments and per­cep­tions expressed there. (Blogs are prob­a­bly more valu­able as a source of cus­tomer or influ­encer insights for com­pa­nies that are invest­ing in “lis­ten­ing strate­gies.”)

For a more aca­d­e­mic dis­cus­sion, with the con­trar­ian point of view, check out Tom Dav­en­port’s blog post­ing at HBR. He def­i­nitely thinks that Twit­ter is just a fad.

I’m open to the notion that Twit­ter may be here to stay, but for the moment, I think it’s just part of the inter­per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tions mix…