I jest, of course. Buy shares in something with a proven track record of success. Twitter is a walking timebomb of dead. I feel like this subject is a scab I keep picking but hey – that’s why I’ve got a blog: to pick my own psychic scabs. And make you eat them.
In its early days, it had a certain reckless cool. Aside from the millions of people setting up accounts and saying: “So this is my first Tweet – how does this all work then?” and discovering no replies and never going back (my gut instinct is that this is still most ordinary people’s experience of Twitter) Twitter was populated by the same set of early adopters that leap on any bandwagon you care to name: marketers, hipsters and geeks. And of course they loved it and preached about it until even I caved in.
Only now, Twitter has money. Or rather, it has someone else’s money. Or rather, it has someone else’s money and a limited amount of time to turn that into more money. And regardless how elegant a solution “sponsored trends” might seem to be on paper there are four kinds of people who won’t respond to those kinds of things:
- Marketers
- Hipsters
- Geeks
- Everyone else
But that’s only part of the problem.
Twitter’s other insurmountable problem is that with great advertising revenues comes great dullness. Twitter are already on my shitlist for turning over people’s details for breaches of the super-injunction and the part they played in the “bomb robin hood airport” farce so they’ll roll over for any lawyer or Quango – or just about anyone with some headed notepaper, at a guess.
But now that the corporates are here, do you think they’ll want their ads showing next to #justinbiebergay trends? Hell no. Logic dictates that Twitter will have to round off the few interesting rough edges it’s got so that Disney executives don’t choke on their cornflakes when they discover that #bumsex is trending alongside their advert for “Little Mermaid 3: Even Wetter“.
Just as Leeds lost its interesting shops and dirty, disreputable corners so that doofuses (doofii?) could buy olives, so Twitter will become the adman’s playground and he can report to his board – with a straight face – what great exposure Canon Printer Ink Cartridges are getting with the young folks.
And, of course, that means the hipsters, geeks and marketers go somewhere else (hint) where they can zanily subvert the form for a while and begin preaching about that to the rest of us no-marks.
The end, of course, won’t be official until Yahoo announces that they’re acquiring Twitter for $48787billion in a move that will, inevitably, “surprise industry analysts” like these things always seem to do. I wouldn’t be surprised if industry analysts were surprised by their own farts.
Gah.
“to pick my own psychic scabs. And make you eat them.”
^lmao.
I can’t believe this post has no responses. I am going to come clean – right here. Everything about Twitter is ridiculous, laughable, absurd and – in a word – worthless. We use it for one reason and one reason only (and I have an eeking suspicion that this is why anyone who uses Twitter, uses Twitter): because everyone uses Twitter. That’s it.
It is like a gargantuan cluster-f&^k of people trying to figure out exactly why they are even using the thing, the only certainly being the knowledge that, well, other people are using Twitter.
As far as investing in Twitter…well, I envision a day in which everyone wakes up, as if from some somnambulant fit nonsense, and realizes just how surreal the very notion that anyone, anywhere, cares that Shaq just ate Oreos™, Lady Gaga just took a really great crap, or Kim Jong Oi in Singapore REALLY likes Hello Kitty. That is the world I want to live in; and should that world ever lift itself up from the dank miasma of prurience that drives modernity..well…what’s to say? Investing in Twatter wouldn’t exactly be money well spent. Now would it.
Now THAT’s what I call a comment! Also: I agree with every word