Is Twitter A Cyber Ghetto?

Cody Brown wrote a post on his blog comparing MySpace to Twitter and hypothesizing that similar forces that worked to submerge and undermine MySpace will come to the fore and ultimately sink Twitter.

I believe the crux of the argument is that the use case has not been clearly articulated, that people are using Twitter for a variety of different reasons, those reasons are all commingled and confounded and, as a result, cleaner more brand-articulate services will emerge that are specifically tailored towards a desired use-case.

The argument, and again I’m both paraphrasing and editorializing, is that MySpace became a “cyber ghetto” for similar reasons. Namely, that people were using it for any number of different reasons and that those reasons undermined the user experience. Certainly it’s true that the spamminess of MySpace and it’s closed nature made it difficult to adapt. Even now, there aren’t third party services that integrate into the blog section of MySpace so that you can feed your stuff in there without having to log-in.

Here’s Cody:

Twitter and Myspace are different companies in different markets but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that they share, and will always share, the exact same problem. MySpace and Twitter are hugely popular for uses neither company anticipated. The mission of each company is so vague that their products are stretched and molded into a variety of different uses. Instead of targeting and building their business around one of these users they take their sudden popularity as a sign they have a killer product. They don’t.

In response, Josh Young, a fellow Dream Tweamer and prominent media blogger, comes back at Cody and smacks him down, basically saying that he’s not really making a point and that the two companies aren’t similar enough to draw the same conclusions. Cody commented, which is always fun. And then Josh summarized thusly:

Again, the parallels with myspace, while not totally absent, aren’t so obvious that it’s fair for you just to point a few out, conclude twitter’s therefore likely doomed, and call it a day.

Here’s what I think. I think that a lot of the original article was a pretense for incorporating a very catchy phrase, “cyber ghetto”, which is a perfect encapsulation of MySpace. So I give kudos to the man that coined it. The rest of the article is a straw man but the main thrust was to get cyber ghetto into the popular vernacular.

I further think that the key distinction, and the distinction that undermines the metaphor, is the fact that Twitter has an open API and MySpace didn’t. The point is that as the uses for MySpace diversified and, at it became more and more spammy and gross, there weren’t third-party tools to help turn it into something else. So there was no effective way to make MySpace usable or legitimate.

But, on the other hand, Twitter has an open API and developers use that API to specifically articulate their version of Twitter and their preferred use case and in that sense Twitter can become the backbone and the foundation of a myriad of different use cases without having to take a stance on any one of them.

I don’t think there’s any equivalent to Hoot Suite, Tweetdeck, etc. in the MySpace ecosystem. The way you consume MySpace was always by going to MySpace and that’s simply not true, nor will it be true, of Twitter.

I do think it’s a problem that if you go to Twitter.com and you don’t know anything about Twitter you probably don’t know what to do. But I think that grouping systems and technologies and the ability to follow curated groups of tweeters will help people understand what it is and help people incorporate it as they want to.

Final thought. Let us not forget, my friends. Let us not forget. MySpace is still enormously popular. Yes, it’s hurting. Yes, it’s crap. Yes, I hate it. But I’m always amazed by how many venues, managers, promoters, and artists rely on MySpace as their home page and as their portal to the world. It’s still the dominant home for musicians and artists to market themselves and to showcase their wares, moreso than Facebook, moreso than Twitter. So even though I find it a terrible place to have to visit, the ideology and my personal disregard for it don’t change the fact that it’s still a major property. As we pontificate about the future and the strategy, the reality of the tactics, the reality of real life, so to speak, should be viewed clearly and dispassionately.

guymisterioso

I hate Myspace.

theflyingchange

Me too. It's a cyber ghetto.

Josh Young

Hey Sam,

Thanks for the link! I agree that the comments in my post are the best part of it. I wrote mine driving back from an exhausting but fun weekend out of town. Which is to try to excuse myself for being a little snotty. I hope that doesn't discourage Cody Brown from following up.

Fwiw, the notion of myspace as "cyber ghetto" isn't fully Brown's coinage. I'm not at all saying he's misappropriated it, but it's worth mentioning that the social network scholar danah boyd brought the term "ghetto" into broad public view with respect to myspace at the pretty recent Personal Democracy Forum. She first heard it from fourteen-year-old named Kat from Massachusetts: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html