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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?"
Along with Erris, Mactrop and all his other sockpuppets.
Podcasting has hardly been sidelined. In the radio business, podcasting is utterly huge--a transformative, disruptive technology that is propelling new business models and new integration of old and new medias. I host a public radio show myself: our podcasting audience is the equivalent of having a dozen more stations syndicate our show. I'm a convert, too: in 2004 I said podasting was DOA. Boy, was I wrong. I'm now at the point where podcasts are the main way I get radio an it's true for more and more people. We know because our radio audience tells us so and we see it in the numbers.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
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 also what we like to call "wrong".
I tried Twitter for a bit in order to find out what all the talk was about on TWiT. I joined and spent the day doing what I saw on Twitter - posting and commenting on my every movement and dumb thoughts that popped into my head. After a bit, I felt like it was merely an ends rather than a means to anything. I think the vast majority of stuff going on there is all about thinking of something pithy to post or feeling compelled to post your location as opposed to functional, useful information for your followers. Even the term "followers" is kind of creepy. Just as you said, tons of people are using these social networks not to keep in contact with actual friends but to simply pile up points in some strange sociopath game.
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 think there's much more to it than the more juvenile "game" aspects. Sure, you could obsess about how many "Friends" you have, or check your Facebook twenty times a day. There are certainly people who do that. I think that's kinda nuts, but there are lots of behaviors I think are strange. To each his own.
As for the rest of us, social networking sites provide an easy (and thus well-utilized) way to maintain real-world relationships when people aren't nearby to hang out. A lot of us make good friends in college, but then move all over the country for jobs. Social-networking sites provide tools to help keep in touch, keep on top of what our friends have been doing, etc., so the relationships don't just die out. Much like people used to do with letters, but since the required effort is much smaller, people have the time and ability to keep many more friends in the loop.
And then when you do get a chance to meet up with people you haven't seen in a while, it's not as weird. Having no contact with someone for years produces awkward social interactions when you do, as anyone who's attended a 10-year high school reunion can tell you. But if you've been occasionally communicating via social networking (or other means) during that interval, you still feel like you know the person.
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?
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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