Twitter will eat itself
Marketers marketing to other marketers
“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”
- Lloyd Dobbler in “Say Anything”
Twitter has become Ads masked as tweets. Everyone is advertising how “bleeding edge” they are, trumpeting their services along with the antics of their cat, so as to appear “real” and not as the advertising/branding/marketing machine they really are. But, at the same time they subscribe to Google alerts, Alltop and other news pushers, just so they can tweet about just-in-time news events so as to appear “relevant” and “in the know.”
Automation
Automation has entered Twitter, with twit-bots from Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, et al. It leverages the machines instant monitoring of certain subjects, and tweets for you on the subjects you want to focus on. The stream of tweets enters the twitter-sphere with the advantages of real-time twitter-stream, providing endless grist for the online mill.
Why use automation? Because it works. Just ask Google. They stomped Yahoo because Yahoo was a human-driven directory, and Terminator movies and Saberhagen’s Berserker books notwithstanding, in a war between smart machines and human catalogers, the machine wins.
You will be assimilated
Whiners will say: but that’s not human! That’s not the point of Twitter! Twitter is about the free exchange of ideas, and my cat, and Ashton Kutcher!
Wrong! You fail. Twitter is more about news scoops, advertising, marketing and one-on-one pay-per-minute webscams. It’s about recruiting an army of twaves, and spamming everyone with your marginal ideas.
Discourse takes time and thought and more than 140 characters. Twitter is the virtual watercooler, the raison d’être of the World of Warcraft jetset, the 30 second attention span theatre of our decaying braintrust. What Brave New World are we entering when everyone tries to outdo everyone else on outing the death of Michael Jackson, and as a result take down the internet? Okay, okay, so TMZ scooped his death, now shut the f up.
But Twitter is about relationships – not!
How do you have a relationship with over a million followers? Twitter is a broadcast medium, kinda like a text talk radio. Subscribers subscribe so you can tell them what to think. Dialogues happen, just like in talk radio, but by your choice.
Twitter seems more like high school cliques, with people grouping themselves by interests: the Jocks with the other jocks and cheerleaders, Freaks outside in the smoking area, and the Thespians divining a route through. They market to themselves, trying to build each other up, gain followers to send pronouncements to, with the final result being self-defeating. The reality is: no one cares. We live in a selfish world with selfish interests. Everyone is talking to hear themselves talk. The end game is that Twitter will eat itself. It will be abandoned the instant it either A) charges money, or B) The next big marketing platform comes along.
The lemmings, they are a-leaping!
Join the twaves, get caught up in the mindless tweeting and re-tweeting, hoping it gets you somewhere, even when “somewhere” is at the bottom of a cliff. The death spiral welcomes you – at the speed of 140 characters a minute.
