I first tried twitter about a month ago. I wasn’t very impressed, at the time. I have this theory that we are actually going backward in usefulness on the web. Back in the 90’s we had web apps that did a lot more than twitter, yet twitter is supposed to be sooooo amazing.
Well it is. Here’s the thing. As the internet get more and more crowded, certain things become more and more popular. Marketing is getting extremely popular on the internet. That’s not to say that marketing hasn’t been popular on the internet for many years. It’s just getting exponentially more popular. Twitter is a marketers dream. Facebook is another that works great for marketers. After all marketing and social media presence is a major factor in whether a site succeeds or not. One can have the best site on the internet, and if no one knows anything about it.
You see, these apps are just less robust versions of old forum software. They are also meant to grab a larger audience where forums are meant for a smaller niche. This broad audience and simplistic design make these apps extremely useful for advertising. Unfortunately, the normal user will see less functionality from these apps than software from 15 years ago. Those users won’t understand this, however, because they have never been exposed to that older technology. They just know that all of their family is on facebook or myspace. So they join the sites and start getting bombarded with new advertisements.
If you are smart, you’ll jump on the marketing bandwagon soon. There’s a lot of money in it.