It seems the Twitter Buzz Train still has not left the station.  Everyone’s still talking about it and using more than 140 characters in doing so.  Sure I use it, there have been Twitter Contests, the FDA uses it, the tech revolutionist Jason Calacanis offered $500k to be a “recommended friend” for 3 years, and I have already determined that Twitter influence is really a whole lot of hype. 

You know this economic crisis we’re in?  Yeah, Twitter is like the sub-prime mortgage bubble and its gonna pop.  It’s the new social bubble.  Of course, you want to know why and I’m going to explain it to you the way I see it.

Prime Example: Ripley’s Believe It Or Not NYC

So last week I received a notice that Ripley’s Believe It Or Not‘s New York City venue was following me from their Twitter account.  I took a glance at their profile, as I do everyone’s profile who follows me, and I decided to follow them back.  I’m a fan of the television show and their Atlantic City museum, so I have no problem following their plugs (1,025 characters) about events in the area that I find myself in for about 50% of my day.  I even retweeted one of their tweets to help them grow their subscriber base.

A week later I discovered that after I had followed them and retweeted one of their tweets, they in turn had unfollowed me.  This was quite a rude action for them to take.  The whole driving force behind “social media” is after all two way communication.  So obviously they weren’t truly interested in communicating with me and therefore I was no longer interested in communicating with them or paying $26.95 per person to go see one of their shows.

If It’s Free It’s For Me

The great thing about Twitter is that it’s free.  To create a personal account costs nothing.  To find friends and like minded people costs nothing.  To follow someone costs nothing.  If it’s free, it’s for me.

The worst thing about Twitter is that it’s free.  To create a business account costs nothing.  To find current customers and future potential customers costs nothing.  To follow someone costs nothing.  To unfollow someone costs nothing… and they don’t even know you did it.

That’s one of the things that I’m not too crazy about on any of the social networks.  They ask your permission to add a friend, but don’t tell you when someone defriends you or unfollows you.  Now I realize there are reasons for this, including people who would become emotionally distraught when someone defriends them.  However a corporation or business is NOT a person.  Sure there are people BEHIND the business, but we’re not talking about them when it comes to corporations on Twitter like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts.  This is why I actually liked the whole Whopper Sacrifice promotion that Burger King did.  It told the person that I was no longer their friend so they knew it.  Of course, they also knew that two 1/4 patties of processed beef were valued more than they were… but hey, the truth can be brutal!

The Twitter River

The truth is that with everyone jumping into Twitter, the Twitter Stream is quickly becoming the Twitter Raging River.  Human information consumption has not increased dramatically to keep pace with the growth rate of Twitter. 

As I’ve already mentioned, let’s assume Twitter has 6 Million members.  If every member sends one tweet out over a 24 hour period that is 6,000,000 tweets.  Spread out evenly that equates to 81 tweets per second (6,000,000 divided by 86,400).  Let’s say every tweet has an average of 125 characters instead of the maximum 140 characters.  That equates to 1,025 characters per second, which is the number of characters from the start of this post to the end of the word plug a few paragraphs above.  How long did it take you to read up to that point?  More than a second?  Exactly.

It is ALOT of text to not only read but to also comprehend.  Sure some of us can digest more information than others, but unless you are using a third part application like TweetDeck that enables you the ability to filter Tweets down by either sender or keyword, the information being sent your way is not necessarily digestible.

Imitators Doing It Better

It’s one thing for someone to imitate you.  It’s an entirely different thing when they imitate you in a better way.  That’s exactly what Facebook did with their new homepage.  The newly designed Newsfeed on Facebook delivers your friends status updates, pictures, and news items.  Wanna know the best part of it?  If you put your friends into “groups”, you are able to view the feeds filtered by the “groups” right in the service without a third part application. 

Is it perfect?  Absolutely not… but Facebook is going to be making changes to automate the feed, limit application news, and make other improvements.  They are evolving past Twitter just as they evolved past MySpace.  How has the actual experience of Twitter been improved upon lately by Twitter?

In Conclusion

In conclusion, if I were a social network I would be…

You Are Facebook

You are social, outgoing, and excited to connect to your friends. You are interested in your friends’ lives, and you enjoy adding your opinion to the mix. While you enjoy sharing online, you don’t want everyone to know your business. You value your privacy. Your life is an open book to those you know but not to strangers.

Strong dividends in the long term.  Yeah, that’s me.

What are you?