I wanted to wait until all the smoke cleared and the hype blown away.
It all started when one of my tweeps asked me in a DM:
Carmen, sorry for the late reply. I think I don’t mind.
You see, Twitter is the platform, it’s not the the object. I do think people understand Twitter as different things, depending on what they intend to use it for.
I DVR’d the Oprah Twitter episode and saw it a week after it aired. My wife and I thought it didn’t anything to explain Twitter to her audience (I would show you the clip, but Oprah took it down from YouTube, but there’s sort of a written summary of the episode here.) There was a video clip of about two minutes trying to explain what Twitter was, but failed totally doing it. It’s apparent neither Oprah nor their team understood what Twitter was at the time of the episode taping. I also thought that Oprah and her panel ganged up on Evan Williams.
The three highlights of the segment were:
- Ashton Kutcher has a gazillion followers and Ashton is happy because his fans don’t have to rely on the tabloids to know what’s happening with him and Demi.
- They had a huge concern about personality hacking on Twitter. Oprah and their guests were hung up on trying to answer “How do I know this Twitter user is the real blah.” Even Williams couldn’t or didn’t have time to answer this (the answer is “the community will tell you”).
- You can find about news on Twitter (they made the example of the Hudson Plane Crash).
Betty (my wife) was getting more annoyed as the segment wore on. She is not a techie by any means, and doesn’t use Twitter, but has a concept of what I use it for. Oprah’s audience didn’t get a chance to hear it. I’m sure a million people signed up for Twitter after the Oprah interview but I’m also sure most of them have already left the service.
To those who are still with us, let me explain something to you. Twitter’s real value is not reading what celebrities say (the read part), it’s the networking part (the read/write part).
Hutch Carpenter says in a post:
If you get caught up in the celebrity and start following a lot of them, then you probably are changing your Twitter experience. As long as you’re happy…
But what’s the use of reading what broadcasters say to you and pray that they reply to one of your @ tweets? You might as well watch Access Hollywood or TMZ; it will fulfill more of your need to know about your favorite celebrities than subscribing to their Twitter feed.
By the way, as Allen Stern points, Oprah hasn’t tweeted for almost a week now. Talk about still not understanding it.
As time goes on, I’ve seen how Twitter has been adopted, slowly but surely, by broadcast media and its celebrities. They know it’s a cheap medium to keep people tuned in at all times to what they have to say. If you don’t mind getting rammed by their digital broadcast (we used the term “the 25th hour broadcast” when we talked about the Radio Station websites back in Netmio) then Twitter is good for you. There are many Web 2.0 celebrities who use the medium in this “Read only” format. I won’t lay out names, you know who they are.
In an informal study, I did an average of the following count of the last 10 users who I’ve had replies from. The average number of followers these people whom I constantly talk with was 373. None of the users have more than 3,000 friends.
The Twitter experience you want to get is totally up to you. Make sure that who you follow is someone that not only auto-follows you, but who you can have a conversation with. The rest can be safely ditched; you won’t miss a thing.
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