Twitter FAIL

All the rage last year, microblogging (and Twitter in particular) look headed to the dustbin of history after just a couple of years on the scene. Twitter is, of course, beset by some high profile hacking and phishing issues at the moment (see Slashdot as well) but there is also a broader questioning of its real value by some high profile social media influencers in recent days that suggest that Twitter is not the marvel it might have seemed.

English social media guru Neville Hobson rejects media criticism of Twitter and points to articles that have lauded its potential for business. There are many people who support Neville’s positive take.

Nevertheless, many others are doing a fundamental re-assessment of the value of these new social media tools.  The legendary Dave Winer says Twitter doesn’t scale as a conversation tool and Michael Arrington thinks Robert Scoble’s addiction to friendfeed and twitter is ruining him as a blogger. As Arrington points out, Scoble is spending more time on Twitter and Friendfeed than most people work on a full-time job; it’s just not a sensible investment.

In fact, many bloggers have done a cost-benefit analysis of the time they spent on Twitter (and Friendfeed) last year and decided to cutback the tweeting and re-focus on blogging (I’m one of them). This analysis by Sebastian Provencher is typical:

In the last three months, I’ve been quite busy as a startup entrepreneur but I’ve also spent an enormous amount of time on Twitter. More than 1500 updates in the last 5 months, about 10 a day, every day! As a consequence, my blogging schedule has fallen from 5 posts a week on average to 2 or 3. I’m not happy about that as I believe blogging defines who you are and what you do in a much more concrete way than conversation tools like Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed. As Loic Le Meur said last March in a brilliant post, “My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog”

I started blogging in September 2006 and it has propelled my career to new heights. It has allowed me to share my thoughts with thousands of people, I’ve been invited to speak at conferences and I’ve given countless media interviews on a variety of local search and social media topics, all because of my blog.

Your blog is your home base. It should be the foundation upon which you build your online presence and your personal brand. Twitter is the devil. It tempts you to use it to share quick thoughts. It’s the easy (lazy?) way. You don’t have to sit down in front of your computer to think about your next blog post (it takes me between 30 and 60 minutes to write one), you just spew out bite-sized lines. It does not mean you should abandon Twitter (or Friendfeed). They’re great conversation vehicles but you end up with very ephemeral results. You don’t leave much behind. Twitter is an information stream, your blog is your personal mindspace. Make sure you use them both, but use them the right way.

It looks like 2009 could be the year we re-discover that blogging really is the heart and soul of social media and everything else is too gimmicky and ephemeral to last long.