I have been thinking about this for awhile now. I’m a person who desires control over their information. Someone might coin me a privacy nut. But I don’t want to forever be in a database of a business because I purchase an e-card. The more I thought about Facebook and Twitter, I wanted to get down to the core functionality of the two sites. And I finally got there when I heard about @anywhere. Since TechCrunch posted the message from SXSW, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Twitter has launched an @anywhere campaign to push the idea that it is a great thing to have people twittering everything, all the time, now from and to websites of known brands and companies. Great. Couple that with Facebook apparently surpassing Google as the most popular site [in the US], and based on its content, a couple of things might pop into your mind if you’ve been on the internet longer than 10 years.
Twitter and Facebook are the ListServ and Chain Letter of the 21st Century.
You know what those are right?
A ListServ is nothing more than a subscription to a particular interest group. So, everyone on the list would get everything that anyone ever “tweeted” and you couldn’t shut it off unless you unsubscribed [unfollowed]. It was slower, but so was the hardware behind it. You could be on a listserv that discussed a particular topic, or on hundreds if not thousands of them, and someone was the administrator. In this case, lets take Ashton Kutcher. He’s the ListServ administrator for, oh… lets say, Nikon. He’d allow people to sign up [follow] and he’d kick people off [block] someone if he didn’t like them.
A Chain Letter is what Facebook is in its most simple form, and when in its simplest form, it is devoid of advertisements and spam, games, and what-not. A bunch of people on the chain would get the same letter, and forward it on, baby pictures, what you had for dinner, and if someone lost a job, got one, or is a newly minted father. You can drop out of the chain letter by telling the person you don’t want their emails anymore, that would be unfriending. I know people who have hundreds, or thousands of “Friends” on their facebook. How do they manage that? I don’t really want to know that you are smoking some great bacon right now, or that you had a killer sundae at the local ice-creamery. But there you have it. Always coming in, a relentless influx of data detritus that when mined for marketing purposes allows a savvy quant to market advertisements to you. You are being sold on your own data, worse yet, you are giving it away to someone who is turning it into a $40 billion operation with IPO asperations.
So, both of these mechanisms, Twitter and Facebook are a means to a profitable end for commercial endeavors. Yes, they get the word out for certain things, and faster than a ListServ and an Email Chain Letter; but they are no different and you know what happened to the ListServ and the Email Chain Letter?
People grew to despise them. People hate you for sending a big email full of pictures, or a constant never ending stream of ListServ chatter with no real point. Eventually, they were relegated to the dustbin. A ListServ is now pretty much on par with NNTP [that would be newsgroups for you youngin's], and used more for educational purposes if even that in any great abundance.
I myself believe that niche sites are going to return. And this @anywhere idea, is nothing more than an RSS feed and a mailing list, which has been around and will stay around; mainly because websites will soon find out that they are sharing their customers with a competitor for mindshare. Then you’ll get a retraction from businesses. Yes, they too are flocking to the social sites like Twitter and Facebook, but that is because they are hotbeds of activity. Much like business seeks labor at the lowest cost. Customer acquisition costs for a business on Twitter and Facebook are very low.
I’m betting that Facebook and Twitter will disappear like MySpace has, over time, and without much fanfare. People are flocking to these sites because everyone else is flocking to the sites, mainly because it is free and without advertisements. Since they have to turn a profit, or sell your data to the highest bidder. One thing is sure; you are going to get advertisements in your inbox.
EDIT:
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter and Facebook are great ideas. But they have been done before, just not as fast, not as pretty, not as enabling. And certainly not with all of the urgency that past users of older technologies put into it.
Here are a bunch of links to other sites talking about @anywhere, thanks to TechMeme for consolidating everything into one package.