Twitter Has an Image Problem

There’s no question, anymore, that Twitter is a useful tool. I’ve gotten a lot out of it, and continue to do so. I don’t use it to “tell you what I had for breakfast,” as the old criticism goes. I use it to communicate with like-minded individuals in my area and/or in my field. Through Twitter I’ve formed relationships that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to find another way.

Yet I still feel a little dirty when I mention it. I bet I’m not alone.

It reminds me of my experience in the comics industry. As much as I love graphic novels and the storytelling possibilities they offer, I still have to justify my comics work to most folks. People hear “comic books” and they think of superheroes and silliness.

Twitter has the same problem.

There’s every bit as much nonsense on YouTube (more, I’d argue), Facebook, and the average blog as there is on Twitter, but nobody thinks it’s silly to say “I posted a video to YouTube” or “I created a group on Facebook.” On top of that, think of how long it’s been since it was mainstream to make fun of someone who had a blog.

With Twitter, it’s different. They have an image problem, and I think it might be fundamental. I’m not sure there will ever be a time when “I just tweeted” is as normal as “I just put up a blog post.”

Why? Three main reasons:

1. The word “Twitter” is inherently easy to mock. It doesn’t sound like the name of a place where anything serious or interesting might be going on. It’s actually even worse than the word “blog.”

2. Communication that lasts no more than 140 characters is, likewise, inherently easy to mock.

3. There’s enough noise on the service now — retweet contests, follower contests, marketing people telling you how much you need them, “experts” telling you the same and then some — that a new user would be justified in taking a glance and coming to the conclusion that it’s stupid.

There’s no way to fix it. They can’t change their name, and increasing the number of allowed characters would make it a different service entirely. The noise? An unfortunate fact of life.

I think the problem is big enough that it could hinder Twitter’s growth. I don’t think it could kill the service entirely, because one of its biggest strengths is that much of the experience is self-defined. I have a hunch, though, that the value Twitter has now is all the value it will ever have.

(awesome Twitter illustration via this link)