Is Twitter overhyped?

Re:Is Twitter overhyped? by wmf on Thursday April 09, 2009 @09:46PM (#555537)

Twitter is great when used for its intended purpose (bitching, ego inflation, finding parties at SXSW). Many of the newer use cases - marketing over Twitter, customer support over Twitter, payments over Twitter, technical debate over Twitter, IP over Twitter, etc. - appear very cumbersome and inefficient compared to the old ways.

We have been here before. I remember a company in 2001 that built some sort of business app that routed all its traffic over the public Gnutella network - just because. When I see people doing something over Twitter just because, that's overhyped.

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Re:Is Twitter overhyped? by mechanical_fish on Thursday April 09, 2009 @10:21PM (#555577)

very cumbersome and inefficient compared to the old ways

Okay, I'll bite on some of this.

marketing over Twitter

Compared to email marketing? For which I cannot enforce opt-in? Which deluges me in content that I don't necessarily have time to read? Shall I even bother comparing it to telemarketing -- is there any question what will win that comparison? Advantage: Twitter.

customer support over Twitter

I've never heard of one-to-one customer support over Twitter. Surely email is better, except when the spam filters intervene. For FAQs there are wikis and forums and good old web pages and new-fangled ticket tracking sites.

But what about generic, time-sensitive or high-priority hints, suitable for a sizeable fraction of the userbase? "Sorry for the outage; we are working on it." "Everyone should know that there's a security bug that has just been fixed." "Today 50 people have asked about Feature X. It's right there in the Bookmarks menu. Read the updated FAQ." These are the kinds of messages that aren't a good fit for bulk email. There's never really been a good venue for them before. [1] Twitter is going to spawn a lot more of them.

I'm not sure about payments over Twitter, but I know better than to laugh: I remember when PayPal was hilariously funny.

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[1] Okay, RSS feeds. But Twitter is, among other things, an RSS feed that non-technical humans can understand. And that is constrained to be blessedly short. And there are other semantic and social differences.

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Re:Is Twitter overhyped? by wheels on Friday April 10, 2009 @01:27AM (#555752)

Relative to an RSS subscription, a Twitter follow is "low cost". Many people will subscribe to a Twitter feed, in part because of it's conciseness, who would otherwise not subscribe to an RSS feed. We've found that really effective in keeping interested parties in the loop for what's coming down the pipe from our end.

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Re:Is Twitter overhyped? by calambrac on Thursday April 09, 2009 @11:43PM (#555658)

Actually, I've had some really good one-on-one customer support experiences via Twitter. I don't need hand holding, but sometimes it's just nice to get pointed to the right url for what I'm looking for without having to craft the perfect Google query. Twitter is great for that - just fire off the quick question, get a reply pointing to more detailed instructions. I don't know if it's scalable, but it's worked when I've needed it.

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Re:Is Twitter overhyped? by wallflower on Thursday April 09, 2009 @11:11PM (#555631)

> I've never heard of one-to-one customer support over Twitter

Comcast http://twitter.com/ComcastCares

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Re:Is Twitter overhyped? by jemmons on Thursday April 09, 2009 @11:33PM (#555651)

You either have a tenuous grasp on the definition of "one-to-one" or vastly overestimate Comcast.

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Re:Is Twitter overhyped? by thwarted on Friday April 10, 2009 @02:51AM (#555810)

IP over twitter... interesting. Maybe we can now test a RFC1149 implementations and deployment virtually, rather than having to maintain our own coup.

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