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Is Twitter Rendered Obsolete By Google+?
suraj.sun writes with a ComputerWorld piece predicting the end of Twitter, at least in its current form. From the article: "It's only a matter of time before Twitter becomes a ghost town. While Google+ will soon do all the things Twitter does, Twitter can't support a long list of the things Google+ supports. Also on Google+, you can post pictures and videos directly in posts, launch immediately into a video chat, send your posts to nonmembers and even present all your posts marked 'Public' as a blog available to anyone with an Internet."
Remember when because some of your colleagues were on ICQ or AOL but some were on Yahoo Messenger but some were on MSN but some had started to move to Skype etc you ended up having to have accounts with all of them because you don't control which account the person you need to speak to likes to use? And the techies amongst us started wanting tools like Kopete to deal with our plurality of accounts? That's the direction I see social networks going in. Already there are people who are Facebook friends whose Facebook status updates come from their Twitter app. Meanwhile many Twitter posts are there to point me to blog articles on blogs that I could also individually follow using RSS. And all those social communities hasn't, for instance, stopped me doing the old fashioned form of community of visiting and commenting on sites I like, like Slashdot. One more social network does not necessarily mean death to the rest. I don't see Twitter and Facebook following Bebo and MySpace into insignificance. It means yet another system I'll need to have an account on because people I need/want to follow/talk to use it. It does not mean I have a new single account that I consider to be my identity -- "me on the web" -- it means I'll have (well, if someone sends me an invite) an additional personally identifiable account on the Web. I think interoperability between social networks is going to be the next big battleground.
Seriously, this is 'Will Wave Eat E-Mail' all over again. No. It has long strings attached. It has plenty of bells and whistles, but this is comparing apples and fruit baskets, or a can opener with a Swiss army knife. Sometimes all you want is an apple for your teacher, and sure you can cut meat, whittle wood, read fine print, tweeze splinters and even open cans with your knife, but it'll be faster and cheaper if you just go out to the kitchen and use the tool that was designed for that and nothing else.
Or maybe an edited version?
For those of us who have never used twitter, is there an edited, "best of" to convince us to use it?
I googled "best of twitter", but it appears to be an reductio ad absurdum situation - all the top links seem to want me to follow some twitter account...
Is there compelling twitter content I am missing?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
And what about those of us who share names with celebrities, or things like that? The case of "Mike" Bolton from Office Space does actually happen in real life (case in point, if you google my name, you either come up with stories about somebody in Arizona who pissed off a Dell tech support agent, or you come up with somebody who's working as a model in the UK).
And that's to say nothing of people who've legally changed their names in protest, or because it's funny. I had a prof in University who changed his last name to Strangelove when he got his PhD. There's also been a fairly well publicized incident last year in Canada because somebody who had changed his last name to Nobody was arrested during the G20 protests, and got abused by cops who thought he was lying about his name.... What's going to happen when somebody with a name like that signs up to Google+?
I, for one, do *not* want to have to send them a copy of my driver's license just to prove that I am who I say I am. Frankly, it's not their fucking job to police anonymity on the Internet. I could sign up saying that I'm the Queen of Sheba, and they have no business asking me to prove that, because it's just an Internet site. If I was applying for a job, or wanting to run for public office, I could see the requirement for some proof of identity, but it's just a social network, and if they can't see the difference then I don't want to have anything to do with their stupidity.