Don’t believe the anti-hype: Twitter succeeds by leaving room for failure
Don’t believe the anti-hype around Twitter.
Twitter hype punctured by study, reports the BBC on a recent Harvard B school finding: The median user has written only one tweet, and “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.” As though it sealed Twitter’s fate, the BBC adds:
Research by Nielsen also suggests that many people give the service a try, but rarely or never return.
Earlier this year, the firm found that more than 60% of US Twitter users failed to return the following month.
“The Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and the Nielsen data says very, very few people listen consistently,” Mr Heil told BBC News
Rather than taking the study as a condemnation, though, I’d suggest that the fact Twitter works despite the large number of “unproductive” users is a sign of success.
More power to the Twitter team for creating a tool that allows so many people to try it so easily that the seemingly small percentage who get value out of it can find and continue using it. We should be celebrating what happens when infrastructure is cheap enough that we can accept that 60% just throw it away (even assuming all those non-tweeters aren’t using the service to listen). Rather than trying to force users to its model, Twitter has usually adapted to the customs its users have developed — and has responded to feedback when it breaks some of those conventions (see #fixreplies).
I’d go further and say a platform is only successful if it allows for failure and “unproductive” uses. If we were forced to justify our photo collection by its first picture or our word processors against the number of poorly-argued misspelled first drafts we’ve written, would we ever get to round 10, where something good emerges? Making failure cheap makes success possible.
[I like the free network service Identi.ca and cross-tweet there. I credit the Twitter team with recognizing the value in openness along many other important dimensions.]
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Pingback by wseltzer's status on Tuesday, 09-Jun-09 17:01:26 UTC - Identi.ca — June 9, 2009 @ 12:01 pm
Honestly though… how many online apps sport the same percentage of active users?
Comment by Tyler West — June 9, 2009 @ 7:29 pm
You’re so right on cheap failure making success possible. So what if no one clicked on the link in your tweet. Be more interesting! Improve! These things don’t cost money opposed to something along the lines of sending out 100000 flyers with a typo on it.
Comment by jlbraaten — June 9, 2009 @ 8:35 pm
How many people get 10 chances at something that they do? Outside of professional sports, the answer is essentially zero. If you can’t get something right the first, second, or third time - you should stop trying (if your employer hasn’t already fired you).
Making failure cheap does not make success possible - success is a variable independent of failure. Yes, it’s true that some people can strike gold on their first swing, and that others can strike gold with a couple of tries. However, OVERALL (and excluding Edison and a few other BRILLIANT inventors), if at first you don’t succeed - you won’t.
If we could all succeed with hard work, wouldn’t we have?
Comment by Dan — June 9, 2009 @ 9:12 pm
Sure. If 60% of users make an account and don’t return, then that means 40% stick around and keep at it. That’s still growth.
I’m more curious about what we mean when we say it “works”. Who came up with the idea that for a service to be successful it requires everyone in the world to get on board? And what is it we’re producing when we say that a service is “productive”?
Comment by Naomi Most — June 10, 2009 @ 12:05 am
People seem to miss some of the “subtle success” of services like Twitter, FaceBook, etc.
One Subtle Success is the creation of a NameSpace with millions of names without the ICANN trademark censors (like Wendy) standing in their path. This weekend, FaceBook will allow 200,000,000+ people to select their names.
Meanwhile, back in the tiny .COM name-space, people lose their names because of ICANN and Registrar policies. One solution to that is for special .COM groups such as the 4-letter .COM owners to create a clone of the .COM servers, to protect their names.
People in cyberspace have to protect themselves from the meat-space ICANN that travels the planet on everyone’s nickel.
Comment by Jim Fleming — June 12, 2009 @ 10:37 am
Jim: Your ICANN analogy is apt — but please don’t lump me with them. I try to counter the trademark censors, not support them.
Comment by wseltzer — June 13, 2009 @ 10:26 am