So Tori (soon to be here) sent me this link which is a story about a new service utilizing Twitter as a delivery device.

Now I know what you’re all thinking… What, another thing for Twitter? … because I thought it too.  It seems like Twitter has been getting all of the hype.  Maybe it’s because of Barack Obama being there.  Perhaps it’s because Rick Sanchez has a Twitter feed on the bottom of his newscast.  Possibly it’s because Greg Grunberg is getting ready to dish secrets to the new episodes of Heroes.  Potentially it’s because even though Dell continues to have a customer service and Twitter service that equates to ODYSSEY FAIL, Comcast has superb Twitter service.  Or maybe… maybe… it’s just a whole lot of hype.

Kind of like the mythical ”power of mommy bloggers”, it seems to me that Twitter‘s influence is a bit exaggerated.  Let’s assume that Twitter has 7 Million users as per this prediction (because the numbers are up for debate considering they don’t make the numbers public) and they are active in either tweeting themselves or reading the tweets.  Now compare that to Facebook with their 150 Million actual active users, which is approximately 21 Facebook users for every 1 Twitter user.  I know what the so called Social Media Experts and New Media Gurus are going to say… Twitter’s Public Timeline is what makes it so attractive as a ”social media engine” over Facebook Friendships because it’s all public.  I assess that is not so… because assuming every user on Twitter sends one single tweet in the course of 24 hours, the Timeline would need 81 spaces to show them all… and it only has 20 leaving 61 tweets unseen.  Twitter is, at best, a really large and public chatroom where you need to either work at building relationships or as one more tool you can use to maintain the ones you already have.

Now I freely admit that I use Twitter and am not trying to put the actual service down in any way.  In fact it appears that December was my busiest month Tweeting according to my TweetStats.  I think it definitely has its usefulness on the internet today and there is definitive value in it depending on your own goals and expectations that you place on it.  So when something like Twadio comes along, I seriously have to ask WTF?

What Twadio does is send a Tweet message with the name of a song and the artist, and it’s up to you to play the song in your head.  It’s the use of a ”simple suggestive power” to play the song.  It’s kind of like subliminal messaging but overtly and done by you opting in.  Now if for some reason you aren’t hip enough and don’t actually know the song, then you can just click on the link where a snippet will not only play for you but where you can purchase an MP3 of the song through Amazon.  Now I do have to give them credit here because right off the bat they’re looking to monetize through affiliate sales through Amazon, which is more than I can say for Twitter themselves.  Still, I have two distinct issues with this type of “service”.

First, one of the great things about Twitter is its mobility.  You don’t need to have the newest Blackberry or even a beloved iPhone to be able to use Twitter.  I can utilize Twitter from my Nextel iDen 335 if I want.  However, I cannot access Twadio using it.  So if there is a song I don’t know that they tweet, which seeing as how I think there is a majority of Twitter users who just by the nature of being early adopters own an iPod or another MP3 player and therefore do not necessarily listen to the radio as much increasing the likelihood of not knowing a song, I can’t do a damn thing about it.

Secondly, and to me what seems more important, is that they really aren’t contributing any original content.  All they are doing is spitting out an artist and a song name in what is (as of this writing) 15 minute intervals.  Where is the original content?  It appears to be suspiciously absent from their tweets at Tweejay.  That is a tweet stream of nothing but worthless noise to me at a time when I am expected to be doing more with less and trying to be more efficient with every single second of the day.

If I really wanted to waste my time, I would not spend it thinking of imaginary twunes… I would spend it watching this podcast over and over again.

Seriously.