Things I Don’t Like About Twitter These Days

Hopefully, this post will not be a rant, but a thoughtful examination of some of the unforeseen (at least by me) consequences of Twitter’s phenomenal success.

People have gone on and on about Web 2.0 with greater and lesser degrees of clarity since 2004, but Twitter, in my opinion, is the first Web 2.0 killer app. Twitter provided a service and made the content sliceable, diceable, and otherwise manipulable by third parties. This made Twitter an upstat on blogs, forums and chatrooms. The third parties became invested in Twitter’s success. Twitter and the galaxy of Twitter clients, tools and applications are much more valuable than Twitter was by itself when it launched in 2007.

Twitter’s success has attracted swarms of people with all sorts of ideas as to how to make money off of Twitter. What makes it even worse is that it’s unclear whether something should be done about it, and if something should be done about it, it’s unclear who should be doing it. You’ll see what I mean presently.

I don’t like sledgehammer methods of getting more followers. I love Mr. Tweet and We Follow. I don’t like chain letters like Tweet Penguin or Need Followers, and I don’t like the pyramid scheme Tweetergetter, that filled the Twitterverse with tweets as to how to get a large number of followers. I don’t like that people are working on getting large numbers of followers to sell them stuff. That’s what list builders and autoresponders are for. I don’t like any method of getting followers other than being one’s pure, cool and awesome self. But if Twitter were to forbid certain tools or applications, it would have a terrible chilling effect on the creativity of toolmakers.

I don’t like Twitter squatters. The Hubspot State of the Twittersphere report mentioned that slightly more than half of the accounts on Twitter had never tweeted. This is the Twitter equivalent of people registering domain names in the belief that someone will pay a sizeable amount for them in the future. In other words, there’s a Twitter name land rush going on. Should Twitter amend the TOS so that accounts have to be used, or should they feel complimented that Twitter name real estate has become valuable?

I don’t like the new generation of Twitter spammers. The old Twitter spammers followed 2,000 people and had one tweet. There are still plenty of those. Twitter spammers, like the Borg, are adapting rapidly and become more sophisticated. The new Twitter spammers try to look more like actual people, except for the porn spammers. I realize I’m being Twitter spammed when I get followed by two or three people with exactly the same bio, containing a link to what’s being sold. The new Twitter spammers use hashtag spam, exploiting the recently added Trending Topics functionality to sell various things. Twitter didn’t create hashtags, so I don’t see how it could be considered Twitter’s responsibility to do something about hashtag spam. I suppose I could yell and scream and rant and rave and block the spammer and tell all my followers to block the spammer, but it would only make me less happy, and only stop the spammer for the few moments it takes to get another Twitter account.

I don’t like online games tweeting. I don’t like TwitterVampire and Spymaster. Maybe I’m just a grouch, but I’m not happy about the precedent this is setting. I could just see Twitter being filled with World of Warcraft tweets about so-and-so destroying a thus-and-such monster with a certain kind of weapon. But there’s that crummy chilling effect again if certain games were forbidden.

I don’t like that people think Twitter thinks Ashton Kutcher is important. The Twitter I know and love is glad that celebrities are joining in the fun, but we loved Twitter before the celebrities showed up. Amelie Gillette expressed my thoughts pretty well:

If it’s a choice between a probably terrible Twitter-based reality competition show or Ashton Kutcher squatting over the ether to squeeze out a few 140-characters-or-less observations/plugs-for-his-new-awful-CW-show multiple times a day, then I’m choosing the show. Twitter: The Series can’t happen soon enough. It’s like that Sheryl Crow song says: If it makes Ashton Kutcher upset, it can’t be that bad.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, etc.