Profit Baron

According to Tweetwaster I’ve wasted 3.25 days on Twitter (280,920 seconds or 4,682 minutes or 78.03 hours) and if you asked me during that period if I felt that I’d wasted my time on Twitter I’d have probably said yes but that’s all changed…

In case, you’re wondering how I got to so many tweets on a service that I didn’t see the value of then, blame FriendFeed as for a small period of time I imported my likes and my comments too.

You may highlight I’ve gone on record saying that Twitter has problems and you’re right I have but I’m not going to sit here and pretend they don’t because, those problems are still there – my DM bug is still there and they’ve increased the usage of URL shorteners but nothings perfect, right?!

However, I like the fact they are a highly ambitious and open company more then they’d like to be as, we’ve all seen their admin area and know that they want to become the pulse of the planet but, they aren’t the main reasons as to why I’ve started to like it.

This is because, after 9,364 tweets I’ve found a reason to use it by realising,  I was looking at Twitter wrong and I believe that this is probably the same reason that 60% of Twitter Users Quit Within the First Month.

Let me explain.

I assumed Twitter should be like FriendFeed by having threaded conversations, likes (which could easily be implemented by fixing favourites) and a bunch of other cool features which are already existent on FriendFeed such as, expand shortened URLs  which it does on Twitter Search, a RT button, display images and play videos inside Twitter etc. Whilst some of these features are coming soon like the RT button I realised Twitter doesn’t need to be packed full of features well ok, maybe it does need some of them because, after all it is there to ask you one question what are you doing? and if you start to use Twitter for only that purpose you’ll find value in it.

Sure you can use it for other purposes such as  finding news, getting feedback,  notifying customers, find potential customers/people to network with, acquire votes on places like Digg etc but these are kind of involved in the whole process of what are you doing? anyway.

Why? Because Twitter isn’t a multifunctional tool like the ones that we’ve become accustomed to. For example, Facebook provides messaging, applications, games, videos etc rather Twitter is a tool which only does one job and it’s good at it too and I’m certain if you start to think of Twitter like that then you’ll start to like it too.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 3:37 AM and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.