Seesmic Look: Changing the way twitter is done.
(and not in a good way)
Seesmic launched their new Windows twitter client, Look, today, and I downloaded and installed it this afternon; above is a screenshot of my inbox – combining direct messages and mentions.
First: there are three modes in which you can view a timeline. Yes, with Look you don’t have to stick with chronology. You can watch in TV mode, where the tweets appear and then fade out, as an alphabetically ordered list (though I’m not entirely sure yet what happens when a new tweet is added), or in good old chronological order.
On the left hand side of the screen you have a number of options – trends (trending topics), favorites, interests, channels, and searches. When you log in – and that is the real innovation behind this app – you can watch twitter without having to take part – when you login, you get your inbox, and “social”, which is your twitter feed of all the people you follow, as well.
Interests has a list of topics – News, Sports, Entertainment, Celebrities, Music, Politics, etc. So if you click on Interests, then click on News, you get a list of news feeds, all of which, with the exception of @BBCBreaking and @guardiantech, are from the US. Clicing on Sports gives you a list of names, some of which (eg Serena Williams) I have heard of; I assume they are mainly American.
And that was the point at which I gave up on the “Interests” section. Because there is no way to change the feeds which are pre-installed in the interests section, very little of the information is actually of interest to me. I’d ask Mr le Meur to let me know when a localised version is available, covering British topics, and then I’ll go back to the Interests section.
So I moved on, to Channels, and went into the Red Bull channel. This gives you a feed of sports people and events sponsored by Red Bull.
Not quite convinced.
I don’t mean to be rude about Seesmic Look, but take a look back at the title of this post – Changing the way twitter is done.
A large number of twitter accounts, such as @techcrunch and @mashable, and those run by TV channels and newspapers, have become primarily broadcast channels aimed at putting out a message – and the UK Shipping forecast (@ShipForecast) is a good example of a small-audience broadcast channel. These accounts, however, will only ever make up a small proportion of the accounts that any one follows. The majority will be made up of real, living people, and you would – I hope – have some degree of conversation with them during an average day.
And this is the point: twitter is a two way medium. Everyone on twitter has a voice; everyone on twitter has a right to be heard. Forget about the user interface of Seesmic Look for now; forget about the fact that they are taling about pre-installing it on new Windows 7 PCs; forget about Le Meur acknowledging Microsoft’s assistance in the development of the app. The simple fact that this app turns twitter from a conversational, multi-directional communications channel, into a broadcast channel for a select few (those who have been selected by Seesmic, or by someone else – who knows who made the decision or how it was made?).
So – Seesmic have turned twitter into something it isn’t. Oh, you can log on and follow the people you always follow. But how many people will, when there’s all this stuff just waiting for you? This tool may have been approved by twitter (see the little “powered by twitter” message in the bottom left corner?), but it radically realigns a large part of the population, turning everyone who is not on one of their lists into a viewer rather than a creator.
Apart from the fact that the vast majority of the selected content is US-centric and therefore not relevant to me (I only have the faintest of notions what NBA and NHL stand for), the very real danger that this app will take an audience away from small business twitter streams means that it is not just a bad thing that should be ignored, but actually potentially harmful to the interests of so many people who have worked hard to bring more people onto twitter and develop marketing campaigns around it.
