What does it mean if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t obsess about you anymore?
Fortune’s story from last week on Twitter’s prospects contained some food for thought on the precarious existence of a social-media juggernaut.
Once mighty, now…leveling off?
Just two years ago Twitter was the hottest thing on the web. But in the past year U.S. traffic at Twitter.com, the site users visit to read and broadcast 140-character messages, has leveled off. Nearly half the people who have Twitter accounts are no longer active on the network, according to an ExactTarget report from January 2011. It has been months — an eternity in Silicon Valley — since the company rolled out a new product that excited consumers. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg used to watch developments at Twitter obsessively; now he pays much less attention to the rival service. Meanwhile companies are hungry to advertise, but Twitter hasn’t been able to provide marketers with enough opportunities. Last year the company pulled in a mere $45 million in ad revenue, according to research firm eMarketer. Facebook brought in $1.86 billion.
None of this will be news to tech followers, but “Trouble@Twitter” fits nicely in the journalistic traditions of Fortune, which invented the time-honored format we now know as the corporate profile, what it called “corporation stories,” back in the 1930s under Henry Luce. These are deep dives written for a general audience, invariably focused on past managerial and financial performance and future prospects. And this one is balanced, with some good inside skinny. The bottom line is that no one is writing off Twitter. But its future is far from the gimme it might appear to be.
The story documents the toll, for instance, taken by leadership turnover. The company, started in 2006 by the triumvirate of Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, was first run by Dorsey until 2008, when Williams took over. Last fall, Williams announced he was stepping down, and COO Dick Costolo became CEO; and last month Dorsey came back as executive chairman. Got that? (Felix covered the amount of money Twitter was willing to throw at a Google executives before Dorsey came back.) And Fortune writer Jesse Hempel highlights tensions between founders Williams and Dorsey:
Williams, who succeeded him, has been accused of pushing Dorsey out, but in an exclusive interview for this story, he put the responsibility for making that decision on the broader board: “We thought about recruiting somebody from the outside,” he says, “but the company at that stage was so fragile that bringing in someone from outside was risky. So the VCs asked me if I would do it.”
By that time, communication among the Twitter founders, especially Dorsey and Williams, had started to fray. According to Greg Kidd, an early investor, Dorsey today is circumspect but firm on the subject of his relationship with Williams. “The most he’s ever said about Ev is, ‘We don’t talk.’
Vanity Fair has more on the Dorsey/Williams tensions and also on the idealism, expressed here by Dorsey, that seems to lie at the heart of Twitter’s culture.
“My role as an observer and as a technologist,” he says as he strides through a San Francisco rainstorm, holding a big blue umbrella, “is to show everything that’s happening in the world in real time and get us to that data immediately, so we can change our lives even faster, with better knowledge.”
One result: attempts to commercialize the site have been tentative.
And mostly the story points to a more fundamental problem: Twitter isn’t sure what it is yet.
Twitter CEO Costolo insists that the company isn’t a “social network.” But what is it? A media company? A communications tool? Or even something more? Twitter executives need to answer those questions, and fast.
It’s actually inspiring in some ways that something that started almost by accident became such a global force. And the fact that it hasn’t figured out—or really tried—to maximize its profit-making potential is not necessarily a bad thing for its users or its future as information exchange (or whatever it is).
Seriously? Have you spent any time with Twitter? I keep trying, really, but it reminds me of nothing so much as those AOL chat rooms circa 1995. If it's not blithering it's unintelligible.
#1 Posted by edward ericson jr., CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 03:31 PM
Actually, it's an acquired taste and skill. You have to choose whom you follow carefully and avoid people who fill your screen with junk (not naming names!). And it *really* depends on what you're doing. If you're blogging and looking for something good to read, more or less at random, within the general area of the people who follow, it's great. If you're writing a book, not so much. That's been my experience anyway.
#2 Posted by Dean Starkman, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 03:41 PM
@Dean:
If you're blogging and looking for something good to read, more or less at random, within the general area of the people who follow, it's great.
Well, it's great if one is too lazy be bothered to go out and talk to the 94% of people who do *not* twitter, like Trudy Lieberman does. As it is, we have legions of journalists following their twitter streams to glean any kind of ideas for "news", rather than going out and finding interesting stuff on their own. The result is even more of an insulated echo chamber of meaningless chatter, uninteresting as a retweet, for the most part. Once someone has read the original, who wants to read the same thing on 20 other blogs?
If you are addicted, I supppose it's "great", but it isn't "great" for journalism, or for a journo's reading audience. IMHO, of course.
Comment?
#3 Posted by James, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 04:12 PM
James,
Come on, this is a hoary and false dichotomy, blogging vs. reporting. Both have their place. Twitter helps one of them.
#4 Posted by Dean Starkman, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 04:40 PM
@Dean,
It seems I have hit a sore spot, which I did not intend to do. I don't regard blogging and journalism as separate enterprises, in fact, just the opposite.
Is Ryan Chittum a journalist or a blogger? Is Trudy Lieberman a journalist or a blogger? Is Greg Sargent a journalist or a blogger? Is Jason Linkins a journalist or a blogger? I think all four of them are both, journalists and bloggers.
I was going to the quality of what they produce.
I already noted the quality of @Trudy's work. She goes out to talk to real people, interviews them on a variety of subjects, and writes her outstanding and illuminating Town Hall reports. Let me say this about Mr. Chittum. As much as I can tell, @Ryan doesn't need twitter links to do his outstanding work, which is media criticism of business journalism. He actually reads the stuff on his own. He reads Nocera, he evidently reads and analyzes every business word written in the WSJ, he reads Leonhardt and NYT business journalism, and so on. And he writes his outstanding critique and commentary on the basis of what they have written, adding context drawn from his experience as a business reporter. That's exactly what makes these two journalists' work brilliant, as it is.
Contrast that with the work of Mark Knoller, a journalist for CBS radio news, with the work of Ed Henry, WH correspondent from CNN, Greg Sargent from Washington Post, Ezra Klein from WaPo. What they do is ride their twitter streams and scrape the blogosphere for their material. Not nearly as useful, illuminatng, or "great" as the former two journos.
I fail to see where Twitter adds value, or has added any real value, to journalism overall. That's what I was getting at.
#5 Posted by James, CJR on Wed 27 Apr 2011 at 06:27 PM
Hi James, Sorry, I meant to be spirited but not harsh. A fine line sometimes. Thanks for the compliments about Ryan, Trudy, etc., and I agree. I guess I see Twitter itself as a tool, like netnewswire or other readers, just another way to find things you want to read in an ocean of stuff. Whether Ryan visits Web pages or finds a link on Twitter doesn't seem to matter. Sure, most of the world's Tweets are clutter, but if you find people who reliably send good links it can be helpful.
#6 Posted by Dean Starkman, CJR on Thu 28 Apr 2011 at 08:18 AM
@Dean
I can understand how Twitter has become an essential tool for the hard-working journo -- if you don't get the initial "Dude! I just saw a plane land in the Hudson River!" or the "The White House is releasing the birth certificate at the gaggle this morning - 8 am, be there or be square!" then s/she has lost out to the competition.
But I have too issues with the advent of the twitter era of journalism:
1) It has made a lot of journos lazy and preoccupied with the echo chamber that is the twitterverse and the blogosphere. Many journos no longer get out and do hard-shoe reporting, preferring to follow links and report only what everyone else is getting from twitter, using the same narrow sources and the same ideas and perspective. Of course, there has always been lazy journos, but twitter addiction seems to have exacerbated this problem. It's really annoying to watch the front row White House journos -- Jake Tapper, Mark Knoller -- reading their iPhones and twittering during the briefing, for example. Aren't they there to ask and get real information in real time?
2) The tendency of many journos to think that "everyone" is on twitter. It is profoundly annoying when journos believe that issuing an "Oops!" on twitter absolves them of correcting and/or updating their work to their actual reading audience. Twitter users are a very, very narrow and specific slice of the audience -- only 6% of internet users according to Pew data -- and are not representative of the reading audience. Addiction to twitter causes many journos to ignore their *actual* audience, and it is frustrating when they do that.
Personally, I don't have time to troll the twitterstream gleaning every shred of information in almost-real-time, and I trust my favorite journos to report back to me the news they find on twitter that I need. I just wish so many of them didn't forget about this last step.
Sorry if I misread the tone of your comment. Happens to me all the time, too. Salud.
#7 Posted by James, CJR on Thu 28 Apr 2011 at 09:27 AM
Well, sure, Twitter is a tool. I like tools. There are really good ones, generally, like the Leatherman I picked up in the street 25+ years ago and still use, and there are crappy ones, like the Swingline special 'The Office' edition red stapler I bought three weeks ago that broke on about the 6th staple. The former is a device of many uses which has withstood very rough handling over a lifetime. The latter is what we mostly get these days.
Saying something is "a tool" absolves neither its maker or its user of doing something durable and/or efficient.
#8 Posted by edward ericson jr., CJR on Thu 28 Apr 2011 at 02:25 PM
I don't mean to be a tool, but I agree with both Ed and James on these last points. James, I'd only say that while I share your frustration with the incredible lack of shoe-leather reporting, I'd hang that on their bosses and whatever structural changes are driving up news-productivity requirements. Most reporters I know would love to get out the office and talk to people. For more: http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/the_hamster_wheel.php?page=all
#9 Posted by Dean Starkman, CJR on Thu 28 Apr 2011 at 04:22 PM
I was fascinated with the drama of the Chilean coal miners and followed the NYT blog, which linked to Jorge Fernando Garretón, Journalist - Periodista in Santiago-Chile: http://twitter.com/Garreton. Soon I was exclusively following Garretón's tweets as he provided the most reliable, up-to-the minute accounts through his own work and via linking to other accounts in the Chilean media. This was the first time I grasped, in practice, that Twitter could be an outstanding tool of journalism, both for aggregation and for original reporting.
Social media played an important role in breaking through much of the tripe that passes for Middle Eastern coverage in the US. In the Arab Spring that could not be ignored, thanks to the presence of social media and Al Jazeera, the world saw the same hunger for freedom among Arabs in the Middle East felt everywhere by people living under oppressive dictatorships.
Social media is a tool that can be used for moral purposes.
Or not.
#10 Posted by Bonnie Britt, CJR on Sun 1 May 2011 at 11:39 PM