Twitter, MS, Yahoo, Hunch, and other boring news
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, guys - honestly, there just haven’t been a lot of interesting developments in the digital media area lately. So, I’ll just tackle a few smaller topics today.
Pointless Twittering: According to a study by Pear Analytics, 40% of Tweets are “Pointless Babble” with another 38% being “Conversational” (which I suppose is a step above Pointless Babble. A small step.) Only 3.6% of posts were classified as news, confirming my assertion that Twitter is more of a communication tool than a source of information. If you’re in the market for pointless babble or conversation, now you know where to go. On a side note, I love the use of the term “pointless babble” in serious research.
Celeb name power: The social media press should stop talking about Hunch.com just because it was started by a Flickr founder. It’s not interesting and it’s not (as the press keeps calling it) social Q&A; it’s social polling, more akin to Sodahead or even the old-school Coolquiz than Yahoo! Answers or my baby. With social Q&A you get to ask a question any way you want and let other people answer your question. On Hunch, you can’t ask a question at all - you have to search for decision-making wizards that other users have already created. And even then, it’s only good for making decisions like whether you should mow your lawn or whether you should renew your World of Warcraft subscription. If you want to know why the sky is blue or what sights to see in Istanbul, you’re out of luck. Yawn. The initial burst of traffic they got from the press is fading, although not as precipitously as Wolfram Alpha’s.
Dumb, smart!: Radio Shack is smart to try rebranding as The Shack because they have nothing to lose. Their old brand stands for irritable, aggressive salespeople, batteries, and out-of-date, no-name electronics devices, so they could stand to shed some of that. Pizza Hut, on the other hand, is nuts to drop the ‘Pizza’ and call themselves The Hut. They will forever be associated with Jabba, and there was nothing terribly wrong with their brand as it was. The Hut says they changed the name to allow them to broaden their menu, but I say if Burger King can sell salads, you guys can sell just about anything short of sushi. Don’t get me started on Syfy.
Microyawn: I suppose the whole Yahoo-Microsoft deal is big news, but for the average web user, it just won’t mean anything. Yahoo search results will look different. Big deal.
Wake me when Google Wave comes out. It’s way too overblown to gain any mass-market acceptance, but at least it’ll be a fun toy for tech geeks like myself.
