Has Twitter been Twotted?

I like the word “Twotted“.
It’s a polite slang word, often misconstrued to imply something quite rude – a hybrid of another word, which unless asked specifically to enhance upon, I’ll just avoid for the moment. Uh-huh. Scuse me.

Anyway, back to “twotted“. Urban dictionary lists one of its definitions as being hit over the head with a three legged stool… My point, precisely. Metaphorically.

You see, rumours abound that Twitter membership, retention and use is on the decline. Rapidly. It’s running out of steam and overall, if these rumours have any substance, Twitter appears to be veering about like someone having just been twotted. Now you understand my choice of language?

I can understand, in part. I recall when I first fell across Twitter. I thought “What the hell’s the point? What a stupid phenomena – it’ll never last. It’s for a bunch of egocentrics [woohoo, over here, dear!]“

The interface didn’t help. What are you doing? Like, since when did I give a blind monkeys about what my buddy was doing right now let alone somebody I hardly knew? I recall watching an instructional video about Twitter and that certainly didn’t inspire me further. Not one jot. I just couldn’t fathom the point – until I started to read tweets from others and then I thought “Oh, that’s useful!” and promptly got involved.
Sort of. I don’t think I did so very fast. An occasional tweet and then I forgot all about it. Until people started to ‘friend’ me on Twitter. Oh, now it was getting interesting. I started to get more involved myself but all too soon I got overwhelmed. I don’t think I’d even reached 50 ‘friends’ and I was finding I couldn’t keep up.
Of course, along came Twitter Lists … but I’ve neither had the time nor energy to get particularly involved in that either. *sigh*
So, even my own interaction on Twitter has dropped off somewhat of late.

It appears I’m part of the current statistical trend…

Worse still, Twitter is slowwwwwwww. So slow.
Day after day I’d get a server overload message. It was a nice message, I’ll give them that but like those cruddy “clear your debt” adverts on TV, bloody boring in their repetition.

So, what does Twitter need to bounce back to its former glory?

Without putting too much thought into it, it strikes me that Twitter has a potential billion+ dollar future (ok, I’m guesstimating but I like the idea) but it has a $10 interface. The Search is crap, the explanation of why use it is crap. In fact, unless you’re familiar with Twitter or bored or tolerant, the facility to get to grips with the potential of Twitter is .. crap.
In fact, stopping for a moment and thinking about it, it’s almost laughable!
Goodness knows how many people across the World use Twitter – millions, I’m sure – but it’s just so boring in its actual usage.
Here, let me write out 140 character message, maybe add a hash tag, a link, picture or video and uh, read some other peoples Tweets. Uh, done. Um, now let me …what? Use that aforementioned crap search facility? Bring it on. Not.

Twitter needs to upgrade itself rather than rely on external app’s to make it more fun. Why? Because unless you’ve time or inclination, you’re never going to find the amazing array of external app’s that can make Twitter a far more interesting place to hang out.

Come on, team – grab your bootstraps and give ‘em a good yank! You’ve a good thing here that can be made a whole lot better! Get to it and I’ll be delighted to join you for the ride! You’d be a twot not to