Robert X. Cringely’s blog “Notes from the Field” carried a piece under that head today.
Cringely (is that his real name?) has a writing style that can only be described as a breathless, rapid-fire series of snarls. I appears that his basic outlook is: “I don’t like it. It’s new.”
But, I digress.
Anyway, his blog piece predicted that Twitter, in spite of an infusion of $100 million in capital (bringing its paper worth to $1 billion), is doomed. It makes no profit and is trying to find a business model.
The reason it’s doomed: “spammers and scammers have their hooks into Twitter.”
Cringely also, apparently hates the celebrity culture connection: “More than 3 million people now hang on every 140-character belch that comes from the keyboard of Ashton Kutcher,” he writes.
He does acknowledge that the number of people subscribing to it is growing very rapidly.
Like a lot of things in the American culture, there is a lot about Twitter that isn’t apparent. Yes, it appears to be a trivial plaything that’s become a serious security exposure. However, so is email, file sharing and most of the web.
I’m sure Cringely would slash any academic study of how Twitter is being used – he doesn’t seem to like academia either – but when those papers start to emerge I believe we’re going to see something very different. There are serious, business-related uses for Twitter. That’s the only way I have ever used it:
1) A computer security research group manager I know, who is curmudgeonly as Cringely, was an early adopter. I read his security news Tweets several times a day and I know that a lot of his company’s customers read them too.
2) A few minutes after this piece I am now writing appears on the Sunbelt blog, it will be Tweeted out to subscribers.
Robert X. Cringely’s snarl blog here.
Tom Kelchner