The Forbes Intern is not wrong about twitter in Europe

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Saw this post on techcrunch and the intern is not wrong. I left a comment on the blog. I also decided to leave that comment here.

Get out of London, get out of Paris. Get to the provinces and the small towns. get into the french speaking, Lithuanian speaking, portuguese portions of twitter and the social media. Let’s see whether people really are interested in twitter.

As an english person of course you’d be led to believe that twitter is popular. You have over 10,000 people in London alone using twitter. Now step out to Portland, Dorset and see how many twitter users are active there.

Twitter is not popular outside of the microcosm yet. Just because big names like ross, branson and others are on twittter doesn’t mean you’ve got an active group of users. It just means people heard about twitter, created an account but then not followed it up with actual tweeting, especially not in sufficient quantity for it to be considered anything more than a fad yet.

I say this as a former London twitter user now living in Switzerland where people are still rather pessimistic about twitter and it’s value.

Of course people have heard about it but it fails to have any relevance until the time when their friends in the physical world come and participate.

The intern isn’t wrong in what he/she says.


Comments

2 responses to “The Forbes Intern is not wrong about twitter in Europe”

  1. Cute but you didn't address the point in the post about SMS. Twitter is now 3 years old. Go ask a US company if they were using SMS for customer service 3 years ago. I bet a lot of them weren't because SMS was slow to take of in the US. Now many use Twitter for cust. serv. So they are a little ahead of EU firms? Who used SMS first? The Europeans did. Answer that one.

  2. warzabidul avatar
    warzabidul

    I've written many times about how stupid it was for twitter to cut the sms service in Europe. It discouraged me from using the service. I also commented on how they should have made a better mobile version of their website for non iphone users.

    I also wrote and commented about Jaiku and what it promised but that failed to get enough users to be a serious contender.

    I see quite a few Europeans playing with plurk at the moment. Europe is a fragmented market with many languages and many interesting services as you point out in your post.

    If Facebook is anything to go by then we may have to wait at least another year or two before twitter becomes anything more than a play toy for people like you and those those that we converse with on a regular basis.

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