First, I should clarify: When I say “I don’t believe in Twitter,” that’s not to say I don’t believe it exists, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. What I mean is, “I don’t believe in Twitter as the next evolution of communication, newsgathering and personal expression.” And maybe even, “I don’t believe the company has the upside that everyone seems to think it has.”

Twitter has been one of the hottest topics in the Internet world for at least two years, and has continued to grow in both users and value during that time.  The company is now valued around $1 billion, and supposedly has over 75 million users.  Every major company–including my own–and most celebrities and sports figures are trying to find a way to leverage Twitter as a marketing and promotional tool.  You can’t have a social media discussion without Twitter being a large part of it.

But I believe there are some fatal flaws with Twitter that, while they won’t kill its use completely and revert it to “fad” status, will impede the technology’s growth and usage.

1. By nature, Twitter is a poor tool for two-way communication. This is simple: the more a person’s/company’s popularity increases on Twitter, the less useful the tech is for communicating back and forth with their audience.  Sure, they can send messages out to the masses, but the more masses there are following them, the harder it will become to parse all of the messages coming back in.  When you see something like the Ashton vs. CNN race to a million followers, what you’re actually seeing is the race to become a total broadcast-only account, since no entity is capable of handling the influx of messages sure to come from an audience that big.  And when a Twitter account becomes a broadcast medium, that leads to another problem…

2. Twitter is less effective as a broadcast tool than basic blog and RSS technology. This is also pretty simple: When it comes to one-way broadcasting tools, there are way more efficient, stylish and full-featured toolsets available using basic blog tech.  A free Movable Type, Wordpress or even Tumblr account provides the ability to post via mobile device, allows the user to add inline images and video, allows sorting by category and metatags, allows fans to subscribe via RSS feeds, comes complete with great commenting and crosslinking features, and, while allowing for posts under 140 characters, doesn’t limit the author to this arbitrary number.  The only benefit Twitter can be seen to have over a blog is that it forces the writer to be concise, but every active Twitter user I follow ignores that requirement and works around it by posting multiple tweets in a row.  Which brings us to the next problem.

3. Twitter has little value as a tool for creative expression thanks to Twitter flooding. I’ve been delighted to hear about people using Twitter as a creative exercise, including users like shitmydadsays, whitewhines and manvszombie, and love reading what these users post.  But with some of the more active users posting twenty or more times per day, following just a few dozen users means that the more creative posts like these will get lost in the noise.  And even if you can find their posts, any ongoing thread or concept gets interrupted too much by the other random tweets.  So if you’re a user like manvszombie, who posts from a fictional world where the zombie apocalypse has happened, your thread will lose it’s creative juice when constantly interrupted by posts with meaningless updates on your other followee’s daily lives.

So if Twitter isn’t a great tool for two-way communication, isn’t the best broadcast medium, and fails as a means of creative expression, what’s it good for?  I honestly can’t say, and I don’t think I’m in the minority.  Although Twitter may boast 75 million users, studies show that only about 17% of users have posted at least once in the last month, with over fifty percent never having posted at all.  Also about half of all Twitter users aren’t following anyone, while a similar number have no followers, themselves.  Not exactly an active userbase.  In fact, another study showed that ten percent of the Twitter userbase create 90% of its content.  That’s not an immediate sign of death, of course, as some broadcast mediums (television, for example) have an even greater creation vs. consumption disparity.  But it is a bad stat for a service seeking to be more than a sit-back-and-watch-what-happens medium.

An even worse stat for Twitter fans is the lack of growth in the youth market.  Thirtysomething hipsters may control the popular press and generate a lot of buzz, but they’re growing older and becoming less relevant every day.  The future belongs to the youth, and they aren’t impressed by Twitter.  Recent research shows that only 8% of teens are into Twitter.  If those users can’t be lured away from Facebook and texting, Twitter may’ve already hit its peak of popularity and could see a large decline as it moves forward.  After all, as smart phone penetration increases, mobile users won’t necessarily need to read their news and entertainment in 140-character chunks, but may turn to the RSS feeds and blog solutions mentioned above.

Anyway, because of its current buzz and the fact that I work in an industry that’s all about buzz, I can’t ignore it completely.  But I’m obviously not Twitter’s biggest fan.  And I look at the buzz and the growth and the large userbase with skepticism and doubt.  Twitter probably won’t go away completely–it may have already cemented its place as a cultural milestone.  But I don’t think it will ever rival the big players in social media, and I think the buzz its generated will soon move to another tech.  Meaning it’s more MySpace than Facebook–a stepping stone in the evolution of online communication, and not the final destination.

Disagree with me?  Post your counterpoints in the comments below.

Oh, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, username pushthepulldoor!  Sure, I haven’t posted in months, but I’ve been wrong before, and if Twitter does inherit the earth, I’m going to need to build my followers.