Better than Twitter?
For a while now, I’ve been asking the same question of the many people I meet who are more connected than I. After Twitter, what comes next?
Looking back, The Next Big Thing has always been wittering away in the background before it made it to the front of my consciousness. I can remember a period of some months in the late 90s when I used to keep an old reporter’s notebook on my desk stuffed with my own notes and cuttings ripped from various newspapers. It was a list of useful URLs for the rare occasions when I ventured beyond bbc.co.uk. Then I gradually noticed that people kept mentioning this thing called Google. It sat there in the back of my mind slowly forcing its way to the front. Then there was a period of I-really-should-get-round-to-getting-my-head-round-that before someone finally mentioned it while I was near my computer and tried it.
The same happened for Hotmail.
And even more so for Facebook. One day – about when I received the third or fourth invite to connect with a friend – I became aware that my vague impression of it as some clubby thing used by campus kids in the US may no longer be accurate. There was then a whole new period of I-really-should-get-round-to-getting-my-head-round-that. And once I did, I quickly moved into that obsessional Facebooking phase that many of us have been through.
I managed to get into mp3s, winamp and napster very eary on, and had a five number ICQ number… which I lost the password for because after my friend showed it to me, I joined and just whacked the keyboard to make a password… mainly because I thought it would be complete crap and would vanish. rejoined months later when people actually began to use it.
Wolfie!
Well not so much better than different. But it is better too. More options and visually it makes sense.
It’s funny, I just dusted off my old dormant Tumblr account a few days ago and it’s waaaaaaay better than it was a year ago.
Actually, you’ve reminded me, Wolfie. I went through the same must-get-round-to-it process with podcasts too, while I think of it.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Tim – check out posterous.com (may be similar to Tumblr) – email entries to post@posterous.com and then get back to work. Auto-converts URLs to links, YouTube URLs to embedded videos, MP3s to embedded players, images to a thumbnailed gallery, and deals with PDFs, XLSs, etc.
Won’t be ideal for those that want to skin and monetise their blogs, but it’s very, very quick and easy to use. Easy potential for them to develop a business model too – take payments in exchange for the ability to add ads, customise the appearance and so on.
Have heard of Tumblr.. but never got around to registering.. and am always wondering what’s next?!?!
Similarly identi.ca (though much more like twitter, only more bland, and less visually appealing) has it’s place too given updates/tweets are picked up by blog searches… giving you far greater reach.. I guess it all depends on what you’re trying to achieve?
I played around with Tumblr a while back… and while it’s cool and slick as a blogging, micro-blogging, content aggregating site… I’m not sure how it can be compared to Twitter… they are fundamentally different things no? There does not seem to be any way to create a following or social network on Tumblr… at least not in an intuitive way.
The gap between the two equates to comparing WordPress to Facebook…
I’ve been searching for the same thing lately. As Twitter is THE hottest application on the planet today it’s always good to be on the lookout for the next big one. Whenever I design a new website I put the Follow Me Twitter bird right on the homepage. I logged on to Tumblr (http://krisolin.tumblr.com/) just this morning and based on my 12 hours of experience it does have the potential. On google Trends Tumblr has been going skyhigh to the North-East since late 2008. The only problem I see so far is that when people are posting images (big ones) the page tends to get quite long to scroll. Twitter has this covered with their limited character count. Also I can’t complain about Twitter now, since I have received over 30 followers within the last 24 hours. I have no idea how or why, but they’re there, man! As I just clicked on GetMail on my Thunderbird, there were 3 more. This is getting freaky! So, until next time I will see you on Twitter. (http://twitter.com/KrisOlin)
I don’t think it’s going to be tumblr, its not different enough from exiting services like flickr or blogs.
Mobile-link GPS linked social networking is a logical next step, whether it’s Foursquare or a similar provider will be seen in time.
‘Twitter’ is to ‘Blogger’, what ’12 Seconds’ is to ‘YouTube’,what’s the audio version of micro-blogging? Instead of podcasts maybe we’ll start sending each other 10 second audio files from our phones. Twitter but with sound.
Maybe their something in the more exclusive social networks like Affluence, that you have to be rich to get into, maybe we’ll start developing more enclosed, defined online social networks. Limited to people I work with, or live in the same suburb as.
Tumblr reminds me of the old Textpattern/Textism thing a few years back – a similar approach based on visual simplicity and elegance. If the Textpattern guys had spent a little less time on trying to kern online type and a little more time on their business model and usability, they could have been where Tumblr is now.
It’s funny that you say that – I’ve been using Tumblr for around 18 months now (longer than I’ve been user Twitter) and my sense was that it’s on the way out. I could easily be wrong, though!
I was attracted to Tumblr as a blogging platform initialy because of the swathes of interesting people using it – and indeed, the relationships I’ve built with other writers on it and the audience I have there are the main reason I stay there. It is highly geared towards memes and internet “junk” (for lack of a better word), though, which is starting to grate.
Interesting thought, Graeme.
The MediaTalk podcast from the Guardian in the UK (which I recommend) was talking about an iPhone app being used by journalists at the G20 protests which allowed for easy posting of audio grabs to the web.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
must we always be looking for the next big distraction?
seems premature to me as twitter still has a long way to go until it becomes mass.
I’m in danger of dragging it off topic, but isn’t that when Twitter will implode on itself, Ben?
As more and more people get on board, we’re all going to end up with 50,000 followers / following, and the signal to noise ratio will be right where we started.
The next big thing may end up being the next great filter.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
“The next big thing may end up being the next great filter.”
I think that could well be the case. My increasing problem with Tumblr is the sheer amount of noise on it – and the fact that the ease of publishing (and reblogging) seems to encourage people to post relatively substanceless junk.
I’ve seen situations where people have over 20,000 followers? what’s the point? I want people I can talk back to… this isn’t old media where you sit in front of a mic or camera and talk, not converse, with the public.
And this from a former DJ, who felt frustrated about this very thing.
I have some people on my twitter list who could reply, but for whatever reason do not, perhaps they think I’m creepy or collect japanese girls undies or something.
Thinking very seriously of unfollowing people who don’t converse.
I’d like twitter to have some kind of filter where if people don’t send at least one message to you per week, it auto removes that person from following you.
Many of the people following me are not community people who I get something out of, just spammers.
Wolfie!
I guess so Tim. It’s odd as I think Twitter is effectively another broadcast medium … lots of passive following, not a whole lot of ‘dialogue’. Big uptake by egocentric personalities.
the guys at tumblr are doing an awesome job at rolling out new features slowly — i’ve had mine for about 18 months now (from around the time it started up), and what started as little more than a clean but bare-bones way to post videos, photos and posts is evolving into something much more, latest point being the “tumblarity” feature they introduced last week, which gives you at a glance how many people liked your posts, how many times you’ve been reblogged, etc.
i think they have a luxury in the fact that it takes a little more effort to maintain a tumblog, so they’re not dealing with insane growth and scalability issues like Twitter is. i really hope tumblr continues to do well, because they’re a great, bright team who think of things a little differently, and aren’t afraid to take their time in order to get things right.
now twitter — well, i love it…but that’s only because i have actually gone and set up filters to make sure i a) get the information i want and b) filter out the information i don’t want. people ask me all the time how i deal with the “noise” and the truth is that i actually don’t. i ignore it. i find it a lot easier and more productive than bitching and whining about being overwhelmed by it all…and it takes me about ten minutes every couple of days to follow, unfollow, and revise my filters.
i doubt that foursquare (born out of the google-bought and then abandoned dodgeball) will be making its way here anytime soon, although i could be wrong on that. mobile social software – especially something that integrates semantic filtering – could really be huge here but i think it’s more likely to be a homegrown solution than a localised version of an american product.*
all that said…there’s always going to be something bright, shiny and new on the horizon. i think if we focused less on that and more on what works for us, personally, as social tools instead of being caught up in a chicken little “the sky is falling and there’s people not like me in my community so it’s all going to shit! waaah!” mentality, we’d all be far better off.
i know it’s a little left-center, but i think the focus should shift back to creating quality, meaningful content, rather than crapping on about everything that’s wrong in social media right now. there’s far too much talking and not enough doing.
i’ll get off my little soapbox now 🙂
–H
*if someone wants to chat about his, by the way, give me a shout.
The best thing that never went big was Pownce, which combined the best bits of Twitter and Tumblr; but never gained a big enough following. The niche is probably still there.
The filter idea is not bad at all; whether based on choices, location, some kind of heuristic… but hey, all predictions are a gamble.
I also wonder if we’ll ever see a resurge of long content (maybe we already are, with long videos?), if people will tire of the short attention span.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people read the internet as though it was a newspaper. quite often a forum can have hundreds of members, but only a core group will contribute, and I can see this happening with Twitter to a degree… but most people seem to be jumping in and adding something, which is great to see.
I’ve been using both for over a year and I don’t really see the similarities. Sure they are both intended to be micro-blogging, but other than that they both function quite differently and lend themselves to different types of interaction and communication.
FriendFeed on the other hand is twitter on steroids and I see much more similarities between that and twitter. You can integrate twitter, tumblr, rss and a whole host of other services into the one account
Interesting points all over this one. Read some research somewhere (clearly I’m not a journo) that, generally speaking, Gen Y are reducing their friend numbers in FB and limiting their interaction to people they actually know (God forbid!). Wonder how this trend will affect the afinity with Twitter etc. and drive the “next big thing”? Perhaps it will be a case of everything old is new again – mobile phones, converstations taking place face-to-face, a drift from the virtual back to the actual world with these technolgies serving to facilitate communication rather than being the reason for the interaction??
If I knew I’d already have shares.
Hi Tim…
I need to admit upfront that I havent read the entire article above or the resulting thread of responses. So my comments could be covering old ground. Ive just returned from a number of digital conferences in Paris (Adtech), Toronto (IAB), Orlando (Forrester) and LA (OnHollywood) and have been exposed to the Twitter hype across a couple of continents and a few countires! I’ve come to the conclusion that the exponential growth of Twitter has come from the offline media and celebrities that have continously plugged Twitter to massive audiences offline (CNN, Oprah, BBC, Ellen deGenres, Ashton Kutcher etc). I tried Twitter 2 years ago and Ive desperately tried to adopt it again over the past couple of months. I just don’t see value in it for me, personally. In addition to that, as a consumer of media, like we all are, I simply don’t have time to maintain another social network!! Im socially fatigued by Facebook – that’ll do for me! Trust your well and love the newsletter. Cheers, Simon
There is a break-through idea in all those comments. Using a mobile to send an audio file to another mobile. If only Alexander Graham Bell had have thought of audio for phones! What’s that? He did !?!?!
The only way to better Twitter is:-
1 Post another pointless comment about the contents of your sandwich
2 Lean right over, as far as you can
3 Butter your ears for easier insertion
4 ……
Sorry, the rest of this post has been censored by the ABC for inappropriate content
Great little cartoon about this very topic.
http://geekandpoke.typepad.com.....gthing.jpg
Hi All,
Really great post – I thought I’d add my 2 cents worth, for me the next big thing is going to be aka-aki (http://www.aka-aki.com/), a german, location based social network – I mentionned it in my blog http://benblachere.blogspot.com/ – (please don’t judge my blog too harshly, I just started it).
Ben
I’m still finding Twitter useful & enjoyable, and it’ll be even more so when we have Australian SMS enabled for it. The only thing useful about MySpace for me is their music section, and very rarely at that, and the only thing useful about Facebook for me is the “Share on Facebook” bookmarklet. And I’m trying to train myself to use Delicious’s sharing tool instead of that, so I can phase out Facebook.
New services that I’ve found useful & enjoyable are Hunch and Aardvark. Both offer opinion-based answers to users’ questions, so they offer a service that Google hasn’t perfected yet. (Yet.) E.g. “Where is a great Spanish restaurant in Melbourne?” or “Which external hard drive would suit my needs best?”
But don’t listen to me, I found Dodgeball fun & useful, and look what happened to that.
Since cocolaco mentioned MySpace, I have to agree that its pretty useless. Quite messy and upleasant to work with compared to other social networking sites. If they’d launch today with that interface they would not have a chance! Ben’s aka-aki seems like an interseting service. That might become huge. Personally I’m getting more and more into Delicious as a place to store special topics URL’s. And Twitter, of course. twitter.com/KrisOlin