Friday, December 3, 2010

Twitter: The Next Social Bookmarking Site

Is it me or is Twitter is becoming nothing more than an RSS feed powered by people who I think are interesting? Now, before you bunch your hipster flannels into a wad, I understand that the purpose of The T is to share ideas with the social web in fewer characters than a text message. However, without context around your personal motivations for sharing, how is that any different than a social bookmarking site?

It's not... At least I don't think so... Then what's missing?

Color. WHY exactly are you sharing that link about Dopey Financial Group bringing in a new CEO? Does it affect you? Are you outraged? Tell us what compelled you to click that share button! Though at this point in Twitter's evolution people can deduct when you're simply trying to move traffic to your site or suck up to another user by retweeting their portfolio of blog posts, let me be clear with my idea here:
The mere act of sharing something does not inherently illuminate your motives behind doing so.
A lot of brain neurons fire between the time that we decide to share an article and its final postage to Twitter, but those dots remain vastly disconnected. Clearly your interests are peaked, so why not take that one step further and tell us why. The ubiquity of sharing these days has made way for vain and whimsical "participation" by way of a personalized message board that we figure people want to see. Why then, would you want your sole contribution to the Twitter universe to be a regurtiation of links from CNN, Mashable, and Huffington Post? To each their own, I suppose, but again- If I'm looking for that, I'll just visit Reddit or Digg.

Thoughts?