What you talkin' about, Twitter?

Everywhere you turn these days, people are asking "do you tweet?" With Tweeting being talked about everywhere from coffee shops and the halls of our government it seems to have formed into a social networking frenzy. And yet, while people think it's "hip"... they don't see the value in it. Nielsen Co. recently released this bit of research explaining that a whopping 60% of those who go to Twitter don't RETURN the following month.

Is this perhaps because consumers don't see how this is any different than the status updates on Myspace, Facebook, etc. Heck, even LinkedIN has status updates now.

To pull out some grandma research, the common complaint I hear from people who don't Tweet is that they already do that on other sites and in fact, that's the thing they HATE most about social networking... the inundation of status updates about stupid stuff.

Or is this simply a sign of younger generations being much more comfortable publishing themselves and older generations valuing privacy? Us digital marketers see that more and more consumers are turning to social networking, but need to be cognizant that there is a definite resistance to it as well and make marketing plans with that in mind.

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Social Networking Overload

Don't get me wrong... I have a plethora of social networks that I use... Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, (a rarely touched) Myspace, LinkedIn, etc, but I think at some point, digital entities have to ask themselves... "Do we really need to reinvent the wheel?"

Case in point - Yahoo looks to be trying to make their network more "social" soon. Here is a quick exerpt from the lengthy article:

In the next several months Yahoo will begin rolling out new versions of its most popular products, from Yahoo Mail to the Yahoo home page. A thread of social media features, including a common user profile, list of friends and regular updates about friends, will tie the family of Yahoo properties together.

When an individual recommends a news story from the Yahoo homepage, uploads a photograph on Flickr or makes a trade on a fantasy baseball team from Yahoo sports, Yahoo will send an alert to a network of friends or contacts.

While I totally have Yahoo IM and I've even participated in some of their groups, I have to pause and say... WHAT? I've spent months building up all of these other sites and now they're going to try and revolutionize the social network category by making me work outside of the platforms I've spent so much to build? Maybe it's because I'm not seeing the real life example, but I have to say the move has the early stink of OLD ideas - don't let the content be free range, instead work on putting up virtual walls. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the coming months.