We all come home- to Twitter

September 5, 2008 by Annie

We early adopters are an interesting bunch. We travel en masse from micro-blogging site to micro-blogging site. We grab our usernames. We test the features. We hope that maybe This Will Be The One. Sometimes we fill them with our content broadcast with Ping.fm, which lets you send one message to over twenty social networks, or we import every RSS feed we can find- blogs, Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter- into The Next New Site.

In recent months I’ve grabbed my banannie username in Plurk, Brightkite, identi.ca, Kwippy, and Rejaw. I have pretty much dormant accounts on Jaiku and Pownce.

We play with the new toys for awhile, but gradually the time-suck factor takes over and we leave them abandoned, like WALL-E, obediently doing what we’ve asked but no longer really serving a useful purpose.

There are exceptions to this, and those exceptions vary from person to person. At Plurk I have a very small group of active friends and the atmosphere is more playful than Twitter. Other people use Pownce because of their file sharing features. The software behind Identi.ca is starting to be used for small community microblogging, an exciting development that has a loyal fanbase.

My friends and I share photos in Flickr, or music in Blip.fm. We get silly with video in 12seconds, and have conversations in Seesmic or Phreadz. We visit with each other in Friendfeed or Facebook. But we live in Twitter.

So I think I’ll take a break from the mass re-friending of my friends at every new micro-blog startup that comes along. They really don’t have a chance.

Comments are closed.
  • Living Frisbee

    This is the first intelligent thing I’ve read on the internet in a month.
    Bravo for your injection of perspective!

  • http://innovationstation.blogspot.com Jamie

    I agree, it has been a summer of following around on the new tools, I haven’t been to plurk for ages, but Twitter remains the one.

    Ping.fm does stand out though as it is properly different.

    Jamie

  • http://www.geekfridge.com Michael Gaines

    <3 Twitter. <3 Plurk. I agree that there’s really no need for these other sites. Twitter’s been rock solid for a while now. I still just love Plurk for the self-contained conversations. It’s fun, it’s cute, and you don’t have to clutter people’s Twitter feed.

    I think instead of reinventing Twitter, someone needs to come up with something more awesome, not another clone.

    However, it’s hard to pull people away from Twitter. Whatever comes next has to be so ass-kicking that people won’t even think about Twitter and I don’t see that happening soon.

  • http://twitter.com/justG justG

    You know a service has staying power when you use your profile there as your web site when leaving comments on blog entries. =) For any real-time information coming at me, I have to have a non-AIR desktop client. Twitter manages this with Twitterrific and others, and for me, this is one reason it wins. I love FriendFeed (and *sigh* Strands and socialthing! and SecondBrain and…) but without a FriendFeed stream on my desktop, I forget the service(s) exist. The second reason Twitter wins is community. There are plenty of people who don’t try every new services that comes along, who’ve already decided that Twitter is the one for them. They have neither the time nor the interest in jumping ship, especially since Twitter’s speed and stability have so drastically improved in recent months. Having tried just about all the rest, I’m inclined to agree with them.

    Thanks for the post!

  • http://www.wholelotofnonsense.org Brad P. from NJ

    Twitter? Twitter? where do I know that site from?

    Juuuuust kidding.

    I know that Push My Follow has talked this answer to death, but all the people I know come back to Twitter. Even while the Fail Whale was making appearences, we all talked about it on all the other sites,

    “Did you check if Twitter was working?”

    “How about now?”

    I have Twitterific on my iTouch, it’s in my contacts on my Treo, I have TwitterFox… I’ve even set up a corporate account on Twitter first, because that’s where all the cool kids play.

    I reserve my id on any new site that comes up, just to protect my rep. I’ll usually post something like, “I never check here, swing on over to Twitter”. But at least nobody else has my bran… id, yeah, I wasn’t gonna say brand… definitely not…

  • http://twitter.com/truejerseygirl True Jersey Girl

    You are right on the money. I go to the new sites, grab my username, try it out for awhile…and end up back at twitter. Twitter is my first true love <3 and as long as it continues to work as well as it has been…I will keep coming back.

  • http://www.adelemcalear.com Adele McAlear

    Definitely true: Twitter is my social networking home. BUT, only because that is where my online community is. If all of my friends on Twitter decided to move en masse to another service, I would likely go with them. It’s not the platform that keeps me coming back, it’s the people.

  • http://lovefor.biz Johnny

    I generally wait a while before signing up for a new site unless it really catches my attention or everyone and their mother is talking about it. Some of the sites that got me to sign up right away this past year are Posterous, Seesmic, Loopt, and Friendfeed. But your right, Twitter has become “home” and my most frequently checked/updated with Facebook a close second. One thing that I find odd and somewhat annoying is the people who are using identi.ca and pushing their updates to Twitter.

    Speaking of Brightkite, how do I get an invite? I already entered my email on their site..

  • http://procrasticast.com Brian

    Yup. Twitter is home base.

    Thanks, btw, for reminding me of several sites I’d forgotten to visit lately.

  • http://www.KolbeMarket.com BarbaraKB

    Greetings!

    Twitter is filled with great friends and fantastic information but far less conversation lately. I think all the recent press has made many of us early adopters, esp. with online businesses, lose the early *playful* Twitter days. I know I’ve cut back on my “good morning” or “how are u doing” tweets and specific @ replies and inquiries. I tweet far less about my personal life esp. during the work day. I do more personal @ night or on the weekend. {Perhaps that’s a good thing?} Either way, Twitter has changed for me. I have also found many more *local* friends who have much more opportunity to network and tweet-up with in Cincinnati. ;-)

    At this time, I find myself being more casual, like you, on Plurk. And now that Plurk has a responded thread (like @ reply in Twitter), I can keep track of conversations there which is of great value to me.

    Thanks for letting me comment, Annie!

  • http://blog.ambajam.com Ambajam

    I agree I like Twitter best. :)
    @ambajam


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  • I currently blog at Just Another Distraction.

    Posts from August 2003 through March 2007 can be found at my old blog, What Struck Me.