I read Seth Godin regularly. He has common sense and great ideas + he’s a nice read. However, he doesn’t allow comments on his blog, so I don’t have a way to express my voice if I feel something isn’t being addressed as it should be.
As such I’m doing it here, rather quickly because I have to go get the kids soon.
In Friction Saves the Medium Seth states that Twitter won’t last because there’s no friction in the medium. He may be right on that, but I have an issue with his method of assumption. Seth refers to the Nielson article, Twitter Quitters Roadblock To Long Term Growth. The problem with using this source is that they are only able to pull the APIs being sent via the Twitter website – and anyone on Twitter knows, once you’re on you use Tweetdeck or another application for your tweets. The Twitter website isn’t user-friendly enough.
I’m on Twitter and I rarely to never use the site to send tweets. My guess is if he got the info from the source (as in Twitter) Seth would find that Twitter has a much higher retention rate.
My 2 cents.
I think regardless of retention rate Twitter will become useful to those that find a use for it. Just like email, although there’s a lot of spam, we still use it as a means of communication. And quite efficiently in using email, we will never move backward and start calling each other when a simple email will do. So Twitter is a very useful communication tool, whether or not it’s founders can make a profit off of it, people will continue to use it the way they need to so as long as the medium of communication is available. The users who value it will eventually find a way to support it to continue to survive if in fact they have difficulty funding its own existence. Or maybe a big company like Google or Yahoo or even Microsoft will buy it and add it to its collection of services to its users.
I agree that it will very likely be bought by Google at the end of the day.
[...] May 3rd I wrote a post which was a reply to a Seth Godin article about Twitter. I argued that the Nielson article where [...]
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