For normobs, Twitter simply isn't on the radar -- still

Steven Hodson over at Mashable is none too impressed at Twitter being spoken in the same breath as blogging. He’s pretty hard on those who view Twitter as a micro-blogging tool and ends with this rather direct summary:

Twitter is not blogging. It is not even micro-blogging. It is just another glorified messenger service with a fancy Fail Whale graphic for when it decides that it can’t even be a messenger service.

I’m not entirely comfortable with Twitter.

I get it. I get how it can be used. Same with Jaiku. I particularly liked Jaiku’s location-based status which is one of my favourite features of the service.

But as for life streaming, it’s a total arse.

Many of the feeds I see about the place are filled with, let’s be ultra honest here, total shite.

There is limited value in me knowing that you’re having a cup of coffee at the moment.

In fact, I’ll go you one step further. It’s of NO value to me knowing that you’re having a cup of coffee right now.

Not unless you give me some meta-data. Like your location. Now you’re talking. That’s potentially valuable to me. But only if I’m free to consider meeting you for a coffee.

Otherwise, getting a Tweet at 2am in the morning from you whilst you’re in NY and I’m in London… that doesn’t help at all.

So I find a heck of a lot of drivel on Twitter. Yet, now and again you get moments of pure genius. A comment that makes you think. A thought that gets your mind moving. It is, sadly, a rare happening. Valuable enough for me to put up with it.

There’s got to be something better, eh? Surely?

The reason I know there’s got to be something better is that none of my friends use it.

They’re all far too busy. I’m *too* busy. We’re doing a lot with our Push 1 For Help consultancy arm here at SMS Text News and, sadly, when I’m on-site, talking to people and giving them viewpoints, the last thing they want me to be doing is jumping up in the middle of a discussion and telling 250,000 readers that ‘I’m in a meeting’.

Further, they don’t want to waste the first 2 minutes of a meeting with me, waiting, whilst I update my statuses across the web to let people know I’m in a meeting.

None of my real friends use Twitter. I should quality ‘real’. I mean normobs. Normal mobile users who couldn’t give a stuff about it.

They’ll update their Facebook status, sometimes. They’ll upload photos daily. They’ll tag me in photos. This is NORMAL mobile users I’m talking about. Not geeks. But they get Facebook. They even get Facebook Mobile.

That’s saying something.

(The iPhone 2.0 normobs that I’ve come across are loving Facebook’s iPhone App, incidentally.)

But Twitter?

Take James for example. A highly qualified brain box IT consultant with a first generation iPhone. He likes arsing about with the phone’s gallery function. He uses a wide range of iPhone-designed mobile web pages — Google Reader, for example (where SMS Text News is a casual, once a fortnight dip — hi James) or Facebook Mobile.

James and I have known each other for more than a decade and he knows my mobile tendencies well. He’s got a mensa plaque on his wall at home celebrating his ability to work out the square root of 99 quicker than me.

And he hates Twitter with a passion. Primarily because I’ve tried to get him to use it. I’ve tried to get him and a few other friends using it and he’s not having it. He simply cannot see the point.

Now, here’s our problem.

Talk to mobile related geniuses around the planet and they’ll give you a different description of Twitter. Ask them why and they’ll give you a response that, when it boils down to it, means ‘er… because.’

Nothing works on James. No explanations. No Fortune Magazine articles, no Jeff Jarvis style explanations. He simply isn’t having it.

“Text me,” he tells me, “If you’ve got something to tell me. Text me.”

“Right, but I’d like to know what you’re doing,” I tell him, “You should do an update now and again.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Errrr,” I respond… scraping around for an answer that doesn’t begin, “Because, errr, it’s … it’ll… it’ll be cool.”

When your iPhone-toting normob doesn’t get Twitter and doesn’t care that they don’t get it, there’s a problem.

What does it mean for the future of Twitter?

I do wonder, I really do. Did you see they recently bought the Twitter search engine, Summize? This is, on the face of it, good news for the company and the burgeoning Twitter-industry of clients, and related services.

As for James and the rest of the Great Unwashed normobs? Have they just not seen the light, yet?