Flawed Model

Recently I flirted with Twitter. The more I looked the more concerned I became. It seems to me that Twitter is fundamentally flawed, it operates like an inverted pyramid selling game. In the long run is just is not sustainable. Eat my words?

Social networking is the new buzz, the new way to be free, express ourselves and make undreamt of connections. Unlike Facebook, Twitter requires you, as your starting point, to select six person whose tweets you most want to follow. Then, based on that initial selections, encourages you to select other related tweeters to select to follow. 

This is in direct contrast to Facebook which start out with the friends you do know and offers to extend your circle to other connections which have a connection back the the friends you have. Your choice, your pool, you decide pond or ocean.

Back to Twitter then. How does any one person end up with 20 million people following their every cough and sneeze of a tweet? Do they have something that is so original so earth shattering to say that 20 million people are agog for their next pronouncement. I think not. 

Your own tweet is just a grain of sand on the beach, indistinguishable from all the other grains, lost in the sea of sands. Only your tweets that are ripostes to that some august body count and might possibly get noticed. How to be become an august body? Why by being promoted as a person being offered for selection. Who gets to decided which persons tweets are worth being offered for selection? By the originators of this pyramid scam. It is all very self-referential. Only the deemed noteworthy are offered and therefore only they can increase their followers, which then pushes them up the ranking to become an even higher favourite selection. That is why a Miss Withnothingtosay can end up having 20 million followers. Not as a direct response of her undoubted wide and universal popular appeal but just the way the network is stacked. 

In my world a twit was a fool, a numbskull who made wrong choices. Or a twittering was the raucous sound made by a large flock of sparrows. By either definitions, Twitter certainly has found the right word analogies to rest amongst.