Time for Another Twitter Reality Check

photo by michperu

Last summer when I wrote about my love/hate relationship with Twitter, it was probably about 50/50 love/hate. Today I have to admit I skew more toward feelin’ the love than bringin’ the hate, but I still feel compelled to bring those who sing Twitter’s unconditional praises back down to earth.

I don’t know whether Twitter will be around next year or 10 years from now, but I do know this: To be a foundational element in any communications ecosystem, a tool needs to be ubiquitous. And Twitter isn’t anywhere close.

I’ve seen estimates that maybe 26 million people worldwide will be using Twitter in 2010. In case you’re wondering if that’s a big number, the world’s population is at about 6.8 billion. So… no. Not so much. Twitter has about 15 percent of adult internet users in its thrall. With 250 million Facebook users, there are probably more people looking for rooster-shaped salt shakers in FarmVille or whacking their friends in Mafia Wars.

Of those 26 million Twitter users, only a tiny percentage are using it in a thoughtful, strategic manner designed to meet communication goals. For every Dell—which actually uses Twitter to meet specific marketing objectives and has the sales to justify its investment—most organizations and individuals are just flailing around out there. Oprah—both the individual and the organization—has an audience of about 3.3 million followers. Not bad. Sounds like pretty fertile ground for further relationship-building with her vast army of fans (or, for those of you who still treat Twitter like just another mass media platform, not a bad target at which to point your megaphone).

But Oprah (or whoever tweets for her) blesses us with such gems as “Just saw AVATAR. WOWEE KAZOWEE!! Interviewing James Cameron tomorrow and LADY GAGA. Can’t sleep. So excited.” So insightful. So like an 11-year-old with absolutely nothing interesting to say. (Actually, my 11-year-old has much more interesting insights than this. Maybe I’ll set her up on Twitter.) Fortunately, Oprah (or whoever tweets for her) has only blessed us 112 times in the past year, so her communication is both inane and infrequent. It’s a surprisingly boneheaded, thoughtless approach for the media monolith that is Oprah.

Besides usually intelligent celebrities like OW and the usual idiot celebrities who in my opinion represent a complete and utter waste of carbon footprint (and I won’t contribute to their fame by linking to any here, since I’m sure you have your own long list of offenders), there are countless “real folk” who also can’t seem to come up with a reason to use Twitter. And yet they use it anyway.

I don’t mean to paint the entire Twitterverse with the stupid brush. I’m connected to many, many people who share brilliant content through their tweets. I hope my own tweets skew more toward helpful than annoying.

The bigger problem as I see it is the lack of interconnectedness. Everyone I know has email. Everyone I know has a phone. And pretty much everyone I know regularly accesses the internet. But most of the people I know on Twitter are not the people I connect with in person. Because they don’t use Twitter. Given the fact that many of those in my personal universe are working in some aspect of communications, it doesn’t bode well for anyone out there for whom communication is more of a peripheral thing.

The upside is that Twitter has been an amazing tool for connecting with individuals of great wisdom and generosity who I might never have met without it. Absolutely no argument there. But as a tool that connects me to the social network that is closest to me—my family and friends, colleagues and coworkers, people from my past, etc.—Twitter’s kinda useless. You might argue that I don’t need Twitter to connect with these people since we’re so closely connected in other ways, but I stay close to many of them through email and by phone—two parts of my personal communications ecosystem that I couldn’t live without. Losing Twitter would initially be painful, but I’ll bet I could replace it in relatively short order. The big question in my mind is whether Twitter will ever become essential rather than merely useful.

If you use Twitter, I’m guessing you’ve wondered at some point whether your investment of time and energy is well spent, or whether perhaps you might make that investment elsewhere. So tell me: What does your cost/benefits analysis tell you?

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