Slashdot Mirror
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."
Can I get "an Internet"? How do you quantify one?
No.
But on Twitter I can use any name I wish ...
If were about "doing more," people would still just be using email (and email lists) over twitter. It's all the restrictions of twitter that prevent it from being a nuisance that made it stick.
...will Google lock me out of Gmail and other services if they decide my Twitter account violated the TOS?
No? Well in that case I'll keep using Twitter and they can keep Google Plus.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Where Twitter loses is in monetizing traffic. In other words, Google knows how to use your traffic to feed you ads that sooner or later you click on. They do it well enough to make a lot of money.
This works for Google because all of their products draw you into their web space, and you can't avoid being presented with Google Ads.
The weakness of Twitter is that in many ways it's easier to use from a phone, Hootsuite, or some other client - even Google Plus with an add-on. There's never any need to actually visit the Twitter web site.
Consequently they're stuck with those idiotic "Promoted Tweets" - which in my experience are so far removed from anything that interests me that I really think they're using chimpanzees instead of algorithms to place them.
Three Squirrels
Can I get "an Internet"?
RFC 1918 explains how to set up your own 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.
I really can't see Google+ replacing Twitter anytime soon, as Google+ has a strict requirement for real names and will even close accounts based on it. Twitter on the other side is fine with pseudonyms and gets used a lot with them, not only from people that want to keep their real names private, but also organizations and companies that use it as their news feed or just from fake personalities for commedy purposes.
Google+ seems to have some plans to allow business use in the future, but right now they doesn't and it's not clear if they only allow that for money or also for the average make-shift organization (i.e. Anonymous, Wikileaks, Free Software stuff, etc.).
As far as I see it, with it's requirement for real names Google has essentially taken a first real step to being evil, while Twitter on the other side seems to be a much more open platform that is used by a lot of people that don't want their real names to be known for one reason or another.