Why Twitter is hard to use 20100818 12:02
From DiWiki.com
According to a survey by ExactTarget:“Amongst the estimated 26 million monthly Twitter users online in 2010, there are very few who log on and tweet every day. Those that do are generally also highly active across the social internet.”
BUT...if you can write, you can also tweet.
But that is where we deceive ourselves; just because something is technically easy to use doesn't mean that it is conceptually easy to use, or that it is easy to use in a useful way.
When it comes to making useful use of Twitter - making it practically benefit you -that is something quite hard. It takes a purpose. It takes effort and time. It takes motivation, commitment and perseverance. As often as not, it takes passion.
The things that make Twitter conceptually hard to use are also its main strengths:
- it’s freeform,
- frictionless in contribution,
- emergent
Consequences
- there are innumerable of ways to use Twitter
- there are no explicit rules that tell you how it should and should not be used.
- Depending on how you choose to see it, the responsibility (load) or freedom (opportunity) to decide how to use Twitter is on you.
In most enterprise applications, the tasks and the structure and order of execution is defined upfront. Users can follow step-to-step instructions where in each step whatever they are instructed to do is validated against predefined business rules.
It’s not a coincidence that Twitter (and other social media) attracts and have been most embraced by curious, creative, open-minded, engaged, rule-breaking, artistic, smart and sometimes anarchistic people. You don’t find that many compliance-seeking people (those who don’t like to question status quo and who don’t dare to break new grounds) among in active Twitter user population.
It’s only logical that many compliance-seeking people take every chance they get to question the value of platforms such as Twitter; they want to keep it out of their comfort zone. Twitter is not just something new and alien to them, but something they have problems to understand how to use for their own benefit. And if they can’t, how could possibly other people?
Now, replace “Twitter” in the text above with your enterprise social software of choice and read it again. :-)
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