Is Twitter a destination for all or just harvesting grounds for brands?

The numbers are very indicative of what we all know. Suppose Twitter is an open microblogging platform accelerated by the ego-centrism of being followed to achieve the hope of notoriety. In that case, people will mislead, over-share, promote, and overproduce content that will most likely be noticed. This content and practice contamination is the real issue for Twitter providing value in its second wave of value proposition. 

Twitter needs to correct a fundamental mistake in cornering itself in targeting revenues from companies that seek to know what people express themselves about. Most of these enterprise customers/partners are only interested to know what is being said about them for market research analytics, risk mitigation, and creating campaigns that are not necessarily reaching the people they target. Or reaching fake prospects and mercenary promotors that only serve to falsify the performance analytics.

Now Twitter is fixated on delivering the noise and the growing corrupted content of the crowd to these companies; however, they are ignoring the elephant in the room: Twitter is not a destination-drive service, it remains a push medium, and it is not designed to help people consume the information that matters to them. This simple yet obvious distinction between pull and push is what Twitter needs to grasp and why users do not spend time reading tweets.

It is time to change the way Twitter can be helpful for everyone. It is time to shift the Twitter paradigm from push to pull and from follower-center context to individual-centric context.  

How can Twitter expect to make money on a long-tail advertisement opportunity that made the success of Google and now Facebook when Twitter achieves less than 21 minutes per month of user attention? They don't because they did not think about it, and they are losing themselves by the promise of being saved by companies trying to make sense of this open social media platform.

Ask anyone if they use Twitter to find useful information. Most will say no, they simply post for their friends, and they now understand that following too many people and having too many followers is not necessarily beneficial. Some professionals will tell you that they use TweetDeck (purchased by Twitter) to have real-time searches on tweets to see if people are responding to them. Yet they all complained that they must look at the screen to see a result pop-up. Other more fancy users will talk about Radian6 (purchased by Salesforce.com),  but they also told us that they are not quite sure of its value other than creating work for social media experts reporting on progress that might not have an actual impact.

Now an IPO for Twitter when they have yet to figure out how to make money from a long-tail advertisement? Look at the Tweetup ZUP dedicated to Twitter's IPO to see what's up.

TweetDeck is free and can help if you know what you are looking for. Radian6 is pricy and useful to a minute and particular segment of the professional population.   So what is being done to help everyday people and professionals consume what's up -in the Twitter sphere? Quite simply, we have applied our Darwin Ecosystem fetching, correlation, and visualization model to create tweetzup.com to help anyone monitor and create shareable topics of interest and the ability to have real alerts based on the monitoring of the frequency of tweets containing key terms of interest.  

By introducing a true information consumption platform for tweets by revealing their real-time correlated movement over time, we can help anyone make the most of Twitter by being informed and discovering people of similar interests. This simple reversal of perspective should also transform what people tweet about. Tweetzup allows promoters/advertisers not to have to tweet all the time to be noticed but rather tweet something meaningful that will emerge in the right context when the individual is most receptive. That alone will reduce the noise of promotional tweets and reverse the tweet contamination we see today.