SocialMediaBust

Social media platforms can be topic based, people based, or location based (they can also be media based and there are a few others), and each is strong within its own focal point, and tends to weakness in others. Some platforms try to change themselves as they go, by adding new features, or kludges, which are clumsy modifications, usually add-ons to the existing system.

Twitter is a people based system. You don't follow topics, or places. You follow people, and once you follow, you'll see everything each person sends. The problem is that most of us aren't very exciting, and we tweet on a wide range of things. If you follow me, for example, you probably will find my material on social media interesting, but the stuff I post on, let's say performance appraisals, not so much. You might not want to see my humorous posts, or my aggressive posts. Too bad. It's all or nothing.

Jumping in to fix the problem, twitter users actually came up with a solution. Sort of. The hashtag emerged as a way of identifying a tweet or tweets as having something in common, usually topically with other tweets using the same tag. You probably know a hashtag starts with an "#". This became a de facto, informal, standard for helping people follow threads and topics/subjects, something that is really impossible to do with the tools Twitter provides on its own.

Better Than Nothing But...

As with kludgy addons it doesn't work well, although it's rather remarkable that it works as well as it does. It addresses (badly) one problem, but it creates a number of others. Here's two:

• Retweets of tweets containing hashtags cause problems for people who are using searches to find all the tweets using a particular tag. For example, if you search for #custser you will see ALL messages so tagged, including retweets. You may see the same message 20 to 30 times. It gets old. It's tiring, and in fact, during chats (which rely on hashtags) RT's clutter things up so badly, it's sometimes hard to follow the flow.
• There is no way of owning a hashtag and no way of controlling its use. That actually has some positive outcomes associated with it particularly if you believe in the wisdom of crowds and self-regulation, but it brings with it some other issues. Anyone can use any tag, whenever they please. There is some reference to proper hashtag use in the Terms of Service for Twitter, but ultimately, it can be a free for all, and its possible to ruin the effectiveness of a hashtag by ignoring the polite conventions that go with it. There are also situations where people believe they actually do own the rights to a tag, and that, of course, is wrong, and can create bad feelings. There is also the issue of the same hashtag being used by different people and with different meanings. It happens.

So...

As a user, if your goal is simply to send tweets to people based on who they are rather than what they tweet about, it won't matter, but the reality is that once the novelty of doing that wears off, it leaves you (and Twitter) with a rather useless, limited tool. It will still work for "keeping in touch", but so do phones, email, Facebook pages, and on and on.

If you are like me, more interested in content and topics to follow than wanting to follow particular people (and everything they send), then it's a major problem. It's really hard to find good conversations related to what you are looking for, and once you find them, it's hard to see all of the parts of and participants in conversations. The result is that Twitter becomes, once again, a useless tool for doing proactive, focused research.

And, if you are Twitter, you have a problem. Indeed, Twitter has many, and is going to hit a wall soon unless it can morph into a tool that can be used by BOTH topic hunters, and people hunters. It needs to do this quickly. Once frustrated content/topic focused people defect to other platforms, it's over. They just are not coming back.

So far there is no sign that this is in sight, although Twitter is moving into the location space.

LinkedIn has gone this route too, with its topic based "groups", while Facebook is moving, albeit in a stumbling fashion, to provide topic areas, but will Twitter?

It better do it. It's a survival issue. Without doing so, and becoming a powerful tool for generating and finding content by topic/subject it's got no real world utility beyond "pure social". While it may still be fun to a few, that won't be enough to sustain it.

We'll see. Other social media futurists have suggested that the next "big thing" in microblogging will be thousands of new topic centered "mini-twitters" and I think that's the obvious direction for movement for other businesses -- niche microblogging systems, much like niche bulletin boards, forums and listservers evolved after the initial communities of AOL and its nephews and nieces came on the scene. The question is: Will twitter do it first. If not, say asta la vista, baby.

PS. If you create a startup to do just what I`ve suggested, checks can be sent to me. Drop me a line, and I`ll send you the address to which you can send money!