Writing on Tasty Blog Snack, Justin Ezarik comments on Michael Arrington’s gloating over convincing half of his Twitter followers to follow him on FriendFeed. Justine also expresses a a long-held belief we’ve had around here at Adrants that most of this social media, web 2.0 crap is fleeting and mostly invisible to anyone outside the geek club.
Seriously. No one outside the insular geekfest gives a shit or ever will give a shit about Twitter or FriendFeed or which is better than the other. Or why they absolutely MUST use them. Apparently, the geek squad are an incestuous bunch and simply CAN NOT live without their shiny new toys. And that’s OK. That’s they we are. But they are a minority and always will be.
No matter how much Scoble or Rubel or that hot blonde chick that does funny videos (oh wait, that’s Justine, herself) hype things like Twitter or FriendFeed, they will never reach the mainstream public. And that’s a very good thing. Imagine if all the @aol.com or @hotmail types decided to hop on Twitter. There wouldn’t be bitching at outages. Everyone would be watching CNN cover the gigantic explosion that occurred in San Francisco’s South Park after Twitter servers screamed, “Fuck it! We’re outta here,” and committed simultaneous suicide.
Ponder this. Why are Twitter and FriendFeed here in the first place? In Twitter’s case, maybe Evan Williams was just bored and needed something to amuse himself with after Blogger and Odeo. And FriendFeed? Unclear. Apparently, the creators couldn’t find enough stimulation in real life. The two services are capitalizing on the OMFG Social Media trendlet with, it seems, no plan at all for monetizing their operations. Exactly how long can that go on before investors say, “Fuck it! We’re outta here,” and start drooling over the next insanely great widget.
That said, Twitter can be a friend to some. Though the ability to connect to fellow geeks is, no doubt, rewarding in some respects, Twitter is just a fancy newsgroup or forum with big buttons and a few more bells are whistles for the mobile generation. FriendFeed, in comparison to Twitter, is like the experience that poor little girl in Dove’s Onslaught commercial goes through getting incessantly pummeled by commercials for things she doesn’t need or want.
And Michael Arrington’s gloating? No shit, indeed. If Justine told her thousands of followers AOL was re-introducing its dial up, walled garden digital playground, there’s no doubt half the shiny-new-object obsessed geek squad would hit eBay in search of modem.
How fickle. Second Life anyone?
