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Will Twitter Join Podcasting on the 'Net Sidelines'?
Ian Lamont writes "Twitter has established itself in some quarters as a must-have communications tool, and its power to connect and even incite people is hard to deny. But does Twitter have long-term, mainstream potential? Or does a poor revenue model and strong competition mean that it's destined to be a sideline Internet technology, much like podcasting has failed to live up to early hype?"
Twitter needs to make a few changes, and its adoption curve could turn upwards -
the biggest in my mind?
Allow linked URLs.
That would double its usefulness.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I don't see any sidelining of podcasting. I can get podcasts everywhere.
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
All of these social networking sites are popular because they let people play the high school socialization game at any stage in life, and they make it very public. Now you don't just become popular - everyone can see how popular you are. It's a minigame for life, or at least for the lives of rather dull people.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I don't know what the fate of Twitter will be. It seems like it's not doing anything complicated, so even if the concept lives on, it might be that Twitter itself goes under.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what's being said here about podcasting. I think the hype has certainly died down, but the hype on the internet in general has died down too. Gone are the days where people thought putting up a website automatically meant earning millions of dollars.
I know some very non-technical people who download free podcasts of popular radio and TV shows to play on their iPods instead of listening to the radio. They aren't bragging about it or even talking much about it unless you bring it up, but that's only because it's become common-place enough that it's not interesting anymore. Sure, there are lots of people who don't listen to podcasts, but there are also lots who do.
Not that I have anything investing in the argument. I don't really care whether podcasting is a "sideline" technology. I'm just not sure what it means to call podcasting a "sideline" technology. It's not a rarely-used technology, though.
It's a system whereby people tragically sit there in pubs "twittering" to other people instead of participating in an actual conversation. At least in my experience. In practice, it's just basically IRC re-implemented over SMS messages. They even seem to have kept the old "line limit" in that your cut off at the length of a standard txt (about 140 characters, I think). In my view, all it really seems to accomplish is leaving people not quite focused on what they're doing because they keep getting "twitters" arriving. If you have something important to send, you use email (with all its inherent advantages). If you just want to make limited comments to a "chat room," you can use Twitter that other users may or may not be paying attention to, you can use Twitter.
As mobile access to the Internet gets more pervasive, SMS will die or at least merge with other technologies anyway.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I agree. My girlfriend works in online promotion at a record label and the impact of podcasts on her ability to promote bands through these is absolutely incredible. People like the guardian will happily run long interviews with extended ad-hoc live performances (complete with a few fluff ups) because fans want to listen to them and they simply don't have time limits like on radio.
Most people I know, geeks or not, also love to listen to their favourite radio shows on podcasts because it's EASIER and they don't have to worry about leaving the desk for 5 minutes half way through the show. In London here especially it's very handy as the radio doesn't work on the tube, but... a podcast does.
I don't quite understand how Twitter has gained the title of 'a technology', but there you go. It's effectively a flash in the pan to many people but it's not useless... then again I've never used it and probably never will, even as an avid techie.
I think the issue is that while "Mainstream Media" (in particularly NPR/PRI) has embraced it whole-heartedly with the iPod-using masses on the bandwagon as listeners...nobody's watching/listening to the crap put out by the "technorati" and average joes. It's embarrassing to be "pioneers" and get completely steamrollered by traditional media, and ignored by the general public. Or, they think that because it's failing for them, it's "dead" for everyone else; there's this insipid belief amongst the technology-using loud-mouths that the world revolves around them. If everyone's blogging about how great jam-and-sausage sandwiches are (or more amusingly, blogging about how everyone is blogging about it), it MUST be true, right?
I can't stand video/pod casts (or worse, "video blogs") by Joe Shmoes, or even the "big" "bloggers". Usually they take about 5 minutes to express an opinion or convey a bit of news that could have been written in one short paragraph I could have read in about 20 seconds.
The whole thing reminds me about the comparison between Walmart and online companies; a single Walmart pulls in more profits in one DAY than most silicon valley companies do in a YEAR. That's how completely insignificant most "Web 2.0" crap truly is.
Please help metamoderate.
I'm a bit confused. Maybe I missed the hype that Podcasting has failed to live up to, but I use it every day and I think it's fantastic. Finally, the days of streaming-only RealAudio are gone!
iTunes is used by bajillions of people worldwide, and the Podcast button is right there, prominently displayed. There's all kinds of content, from public radio shows that I can now enjoy whenever is convenient for me instead of whenever they're broadcast on the air, commercial stuff like NBC Nightly News, tons of independent stuff running the gamut from utter crap to sheer genius, great comedy like The Onion Radio News and the Weekly Radio Address, and probably more I haven't bothered to look for yet.
Of course I understand that many people aren't interested in any of this, and that's fine, but Podcasting is certainly not a failure.
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I've always dreaded that, upon growing older, I would become one of those old folks who just don't "get it". You know, like your granddad who doesn't know what all this hype is about the Internet, or your elderly Aunt whose VCR always flashes "12:00". Thus, I've made an effort to keep abreast of current technologies and trends.
Now I look at Twitter, and I have to wonder, has the "not getting it" finally started to overwhelm me? Is it possible that Twitter isn't something other than just broadcast instant messaging for the ADD crowd? Could it actually be something more than taking social networking to a pathetic extreme, where informing your friends of your breakfast choices and bowel movements via SMS somehow seems like a good idea? Am I going to be relegated to shaking my fists and yelling at kids to "Get off of my lawn^H^H^H^H Internets!" like some sort of crotchety old miser?
According to CmdrTaco, he's a tool.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Dude, chill out. The word has entered the OED, as well as all respectable dictionaries. Indeed, I find Webster's definition quite apt:
a Web-based audio broadcast via an RSS feed, accessed by subscription over the Internet
As you can see, there's no mention of 'iPod' in the definition of the word; nor has there ever been. Now, the etymology of a word is very different to its definition, and I'll grant you that etymologically speaking, podcast wasn't the most correct word to describe this technology, but if you look at the etymology of most of the words we are now using in the English language, you'll see that we are using many of our words in a very convoluted manner. Quite often, the definition we now associate to our words vastly differs with what etymologically the word should mean.
Reading today's news articles, I'm sure when we read: Zimbabwe's Wildlife Decimated by Economic Crisis, we don't think that they are systematically killing one out of ten wildlife species in Zimbabwe, even though that's what etymologically, decimate should mean. Now, why should it be any different for podcast?
Languages are living creatures, they evolve and change. At the end of the day, language is a means of communication, and if by saying podcast, both me and you are referring to the same thing and communicating effetively, not only is podcasting not wrong, it is quite an apt and unambiguous word.
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