[meanguy]

I particularly disagree with the conclusion that Twitter would have become some sort of magical panacea as opposed to the screenshot he provides: https://twitter.com/#!/daltonc/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitt...

The problem there is yet another crappy "what's hot" or "what's trending" or "what's popular" block. Google can't solve it for news, Netflix can't solve it for movies, Amazon can't solve it for related products, and a half-borked, underfunded API for accessing the Twitter firehose is unlikely to create an ecosystem for startups that magically condense the entire world's real-time chit-chat into something I find compelling.

Yet isn't that block fundamentally the (false) promise of Twitter? We'll let you, Mr. Brandybrand [perhaps an individual], target your products and ideas and political manifestos that change the world and the blog posts and cat pictures and defamatory attacks and racist sentiments that don't -- somehow to people who'll find it interesting?

The World's Fairs promised us flying cars; Hollywood promised us a flying skateboard. Both still live on in our dreams, so I have a tough time thinking "marketing" killed 'em.

Especially given Twitter's very public technology missteps. Hash exclamation point, ya digg? Half a billion later and the site still loads correctly about as often as Gawker does. He's bitching that an API can't party on their data? Hell, I can't even retrieve my own direct messages from a year ago on the site itself.

Meanwhile: somebody just replied in email with "HAHAHAHA!" Gmail inserted a widget offering to translate it from Filipino and shows an ad for Coconuts beside it. Coconuts! Meanwhile my last Twitter notification is in the Spam folder.

Nope, this isn't "the marketing guys."

[demachina]

Trends on Twitter just aren't important enough for everyone to constantly cite as to why Twitter sucks or why our species is doomed. Its just a source of brief entertainment to see what large numbers of people you probably don't have much in common with are obsessing over at the moment.

Effective Twitter usage is to follow large numbers of interesting people and news sources and then look at the trending topics among the people you care about, you have things in common with and whose opinions you value. Unfortunately Twitter doesn't do trends for just your stream which is one of the many reasons third party clients can rock and Twitter, the company, tends to not rock.