Interesting post on Techcrunch asking if Twitter is becoming more like MySpace, which wants to be more like Facebook which…wants to be more like Twitter. Well life's a smorgasbord.
Written by Mrinal Desai, an early employee of LinkedIn, he lists some pretty good reasons why Twitter is becoming MySpace like. I never got on with MySpace, always seemed very cluttered, the connections not very real and overly marketed too. Demographics has something to do with that, but Facebook was a different story. Used it early on, found it worked on a number of levels, and for me still does. On and off.These are similar points that Desai makes before he gets to question about the MySpacing of Twitter. He has come up with five parallels:• There is a competition for followers similar to collecting "friends" on MySpace• Anonymity is normal on both Twitter and MySpace, unlike Facebook• Fake profiles are proliferating• Real celebrity profiles are also proliferating, but they are often maintained by someone else for marketing, leading to spam• Finally, the one most evident visually—services like Twitback and Twitterbacks I've blogged about some of this as well recently and also referred to the recent New York Times piece that uncovered ghost writers like Annie Colbert who tweets for Guy Kawasaki, Lauren Kozak who tweets sometimes for Britney Spears and Chris Romero for 50Cent.Chris Romero stuff for 50cent is the best. He had a recent Tweeting classic: "My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends". Then you have all the fake celebrities. Some of these are serious concerns and I am amazed that anyone would waste their time maintaining fake Twitter accounts. The wonderful Tina Fey of '30 Rock' has 224,000 plus followers, but its not her. What's that about? Might as well have a Fey quote generator.
"If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs."There's loads more fakery going Twitterside, which like MySpace, as Desai points out, exploits Twitter's anonymity. He makes a point about how MySpace's anonymity worked as a competitive advantage against Friendster, but that isn't really what Twitter is about and the closing down and suspension of some fake accounts supports that. "MySpace effectively exploited Friendster's technical problems, but so far no one has been able to do the same whenever Twitter sputters. And I don’t think they will. The Achilles’ heel for Twitter is not technology - it is the experience (with the site itself and with other users)."Does Twitter want to be more like MySpace, which is cleaning up to be more like Facebook, which wants to be like Twitter? Where shall these three meet—in thunder, lightning or rain?"More on Techcrunch
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Having sifted the rumour mill this morning, I'm not sure if there are any gold nuggets there. It
There's carnage at MySpace. Almost 800 jobs cut within a week and the closed sign being hung up around
Gordon Macmillan
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