Lately there has been a lot of media attention around the online site, Twitter.com. This new form of narcissistic pleasure allows people to constantly inform their circle of friends where they are and what they are doing with up to the minute “tweets”. People have made a fortune trying to extol to virtues of this new technology – claiming that it is the new marketing revolution. What I postulate to these people is – who cares? In a breath of fresh air, someone finally calls it for what is is – the CEO of Google sees Twitter as a fly by night fad:
Google CEO: Twitter A ‘Poor Man’s Email System’
“Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems,” he said this afternoon at Morgan Stanley’s technology conference. (Live notes here.) What’s he talking about?
“In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?
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March 4, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Soviet Canuckistan
To be a devil’s advocate, mister gmail ceo just might have some vested interests in email, and might be trying to put a damper on a competitive service. It’s proven highly effective in emergency situations, like the most recent virginia tech killing. Much easier than sending emails saying “hey, get teh #&$@ out of the skoolz!!!1!!”. Maybe it seems so useless to us because our phone carriers won’t pick it up.
March 4, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Kevin Jagger
I think Google’s CEO’s comments need to be taken with a grain of salt. With that said though, I had an interesting experience on Twitter today. I “tweeted” someone in the US whom I would have otherwise not been able to get a hold of. I sent them a tweet and then a direct message and my direct message asked for their email. What the hell was the point of all that? No doubt she responded to my email directly because I prompted her on Twitter but is that it? Did she bond with me because we are so clever to have found out about Twitter so she “did me a favour” by responding to my email when if I had emailed her cold (by simply looking up her email on her company’s website) she likely would have just deleted it. As an active Twitterer I am still trying to uncover its purpose….