Scoble is not the target user
Friday, April 18th, 2008In what has to be the most echoed tweet in the tech echo chamber, Robert Scoble has now thrown in the towel on Twitter. Some are reporting this as a sign that the echo chamber of mutual self-aggregation is finally breaking down. The problem is that Scoble is not a symptom of anything but Scoble. He is an outlier in the social technosphere. Scoble’s goal is not to reach his friends, nobody has 20,000 friends, but to point as many eyes as possible at Scoble. That is a business model, not a social model. There is nothing wrong with this, unless software developers try to craft their product to catch his attention. This is not meant to attack Scoble. He serves a useful role as a broadcaster of tech news and gossip. I read his feeds and find them a useful indicator of the A-list buzz, but I don’t think of him as a typical user, and certainly not the target user for software I am creating. Any software developer who makes this mistake is aiming at a totally anomalous usage pattern. Should Twitter try to make its experience better for someone who wants to follow 20,000 people in an attempt to get those 20,000 people to follow him? I certainly hope not. They may get buzz, but their features will not appeal to people who want to follow a circle of individuals they actually know and care about.