Twitter Lifespan.. What next ??

Twitter is over crowded and the strategies involving it is becoming increasingly difficult. But then, it’s all the more challenging, isn’t it? Social Media to most pundits is a conversation and that is powered by various user content based tools. Twitter is one of them and has been the hottest one in the last few months. Its rise has been meteoric much like its social networking predecessor, facebook. It receives over 3 million UMVs (Unique Monthly Visitors), and has seen a daily growth of approximately 420% over the past 12 months.

Though they are different from one another in terms of features and usability both twitter and facebook serve the purpose of the social media theory, communication. However, as with facebook, twitter too will soon start to suffer from the ‘data splurge’ syndrome. It’s fast loosing the personal touch and being used more as a marketing medium. This not only detracts the users from such profiles but also causes irreplaceable damage to the domain. It’s difficult to find the required data and too much of information makes the user’s experience rather grim. The bounce rates start falling and it becomes a tool which only attracts new users and not new interactions from existing users. Facebook users who had registered 12 months prior have accepted of having gone down on their visits to the site. Most use it as repository for their snaps and videos while others use it for people search.

But then every social media site seeks popularity to make it a more powerful tool. So how does it survive the ‘plateau effect’ (the user traffic stats remains static while the bounce rates fall)? What can a Twitter or Facebook possibly do to diversify? What can they do to stop their popularity from ultimately paving the way to their collapse? Somehow they have to show a new way to their extensive user-database with another interesting and interactive tool. That should help them keep their massive list of followers/ users intact and then subsequently, grow.. Much like what google did with gmail.

Mission: Silence Tweets

I maybe wrong but this certainly seems like Google’s answer to Twitter. Latitude, the latest offering from Google is out and is already catching on. It lets you track locations of your family and friends on the run without relying on calls or anything. Latitude is BIG!! And more so because it’s a real time social networking tool. I used it and felt great initially. Cashing in on its existing contact building applications like Gmail and Gtalk, this is the new networking tool that Google could have offered effectively. And so it did.

It still is a bit clumsy in some aspects though. The OS and Browser dependency shall not really popularize it wholesomely and spread the fire as soon as they would have wanted it to. For Mobile phone users, it again is restrained to some few models. But, Google promises to expand the application’s mobile usability reach soon. It’ll be interesting to see how Google propagates it and makes this its primary social networking tool.

What’s most interesting about this application is the ownership rights that a user exercises over publishing their location details. They can opt out of this feature whenever they want. Also, interestingly, the Gtalk status message will now be competing directly with the tweets and I bet Twitter will be hurt if Google gets rid of the compatibility issues.

So now the CEOs will have a perquisite for their managers. Give them a phone with Latitude enabled. And with answer already known, here comes the call from the CEO, “Where are you?”