The Problem With Twitter

Twitter as we all know is a fantastic messaging platform, so much so that nearly a billion people are registered with the site. But I don’t want to talk about that, rather I’d like to discuss how it has gotten so ubiquitous and depended upon it’s indispensable.

And that’s a problem.

Twitter is now more than just a service, it’s a messaging platform as useful as IM, SMS, email and the telephone. It’s indispensable during emergencies, political elections, social movements. Sure it’s more broadcast than engagement but it’s useful to the nth degree.

The problem I have with Twitter, as it nears a billion users, is that it doesn’t talk to other platforms. At all. It doesn’t work with Facebook or Google+, its hashtags and @ddresses don’t talk to any other network.

But it should.

Twitter is a behemoth but it’s not invincible, Twitter has issues with bandwidth, outages and intentional service blockages. Twitter can be turned off, monitored, shut down. Countries facing civil unrest have seen this occur over and over. What I’d like to see is a robust communications network that integrates across the web, which routes around outages and allows cross communication regardless of platform. As dependence upon both Twitter and Facebook grown, the ability for the large social networks to talk to each other is crucial for movements to thrive and ecosystems to grow.

When email first appeared, each system was a closed silo. Of course that didn’t last long as the utility of cross messaging system was realized. If you’re on Verizon all of your friends don’t need to be on Verizon for you to speak with them, so why Twitter?

The degree to which we use and depend upon Twitter is astounding. So my mom doesn’t use it, but maybe she should. It’s profoundly useful at connecting the world the moment it needs connecting but we need to ensure that it continues to benefit all of us. Twitter has an obligation to play nice with all the social networks. Just like I can call my mom when I need to, regardless to the carrier, I should be able to Facebook her Twitter.