The death of Twitter

Is Twitter dying?

I recently read a very illuminating article on the perfect storm that lead to the collapse of Myspace. Now, whilst Twitter doesn't have half of the problems of Myspace, and whilst Facebook isn't a direct competitor, Twitter is struggling.

[interestingly - and purely as an aside - one of the complaints Mr Percival makes about Myspace is that it tried to do too much - have too many verticals - a complaint I have similarly made of Buzzfeed]

And I'm starting to notice it.

I can't say I was an early adopter; but for a chap living in the middle of England I was an early adopter. My London friends joined a couple of years before I did and have 30,000 - 70,000 tweets to their name; whilst I have a measly 13,000. That said, my 13,000 compares very favourably with my local friends - most of whom have yet to break a thousand. Just as it has taken the hipster beard a very long time to make its way to the provinces, so it has with Twitter.

But one of the problems with twitter - as identified by a number of commentators, including the BBCs Rory Cellan-Jones (I've struggled to find the article) - is that people struggle to get to grips with the Twitter experience. People join, follow a few accounts, and then wonder what else it does. And there are a number of reasons for this problem which spawn other problems as well.

The anonymity of Twitter can make it difficult to find your friends, unless you know their handle. And this allows users to have multiple accounts - lovely if you want one personal, one work account. Or, as is often the case, multiple accounts to troll.

And that's another problem with the anonymity - the trolling. A number of high profile people have quit because of the trolling. This is a problem that deserves an entire post in itself as to why this happens; but it does.

Some accounts are, very naturally, short-lived. We all remember CatBinLady? Or UKIPWeather? Or KatyPerrysLeftShark ? The things are very much a zeitgeist moment and - let's face it - as accounts are free to set up, why not? Let's have a little fun. Even some of the more established accounts - such as @queen_uk or @soverybritish run out of steam - usually after the first book has been published - and resort to far fewer posts, and recycling old posts again.

And then there are the fake accounts - the spambots that follow you. These don't really cause any harm (unless you're stupid and click the links) but they very much dust a thrill with ennui. Oooh, a new follower! you exclaim. And then you find out it's a spambot. And eventually you just don't care.

Now, people are very eager to predict the demise of Twitter. Analysts have had their fingers burnt by failing to predict other failures - most notably MySpace, but also Bebo, Friendster, Faceparty and others as well as non-SM failures, like Anderson accounting and Enron, Woolworths and many more. If you don't call it early, you're dead as an analyst. If you're wrong and it goes on to be a success; people will probably forget. But if you can hold your hand up and say "I called it first" you win - just look at Robert Peston's much lauded breaking of the Northern Rock collapse (and then subsequently the Bradford & Bingley implosion).

People have been a bit desperate for Twitter to fail, purely so they could call it first. They report problems generating profits, problems increasing or retaining users, competition (where really there isn't competition). Mostly it is the people who don't use it and don't understand it who are waiting for the fall.

But, as I say, there does seem to be a shift. The Londoners have gotten fed up with hipsters and shaved off their beards just as the fashion has hit the provinces. And so they appear to be shaving off their Twitter. Purely anecdotally, I have noticed some of the accounts I follow have dropped from posting five, ten, twenty times a day to going five days without posting at all. And some have dropped off Twitter entirely.

Now, this may be a winter fad - we all get a bit reclusive in winter, and that mood can spread to our online interaction too. It may be that as more and more stories of people getting prosecuted for online abuse; or losing jobs because of an inappropriate post, finally we are starting to learn a bit of SM etiquette. It may simply be a coincidence of personal circumstances - a number of my friends have recently changed jobs, and let's face it, when I changed my job 18 months ago, the first thing to take a hit was this blog.

And this is not confined to Twitter - the complaints I have seen about Facebook have increased, with more people ditching the site or at the very least posting considerably less to it. So it seems social media may have grown out of an anarchic adolescence an into a (slightly) more sensible adult. It could, perhaps, be the deflating of the second dot com bubble. It could just be a coincidental blip and that things will recover. Or it could be what is a busy SM market - with Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest and many many more - consolidating into a more mature market with fewer, bigger players naturally swallowing or squeezing out those that just don't have the might.

As they say, the patient is not yet on life support; but whether it is healthy enough to discharge is another matter.