One year ago today, I wrote my very first post about Twitter. At the time, I said that, despite the ever-building buzz, I had my doubts about how important it really was to be on it. I listed five specific factors that made me question its value. Today I'm going to revisit each of those to see what has and hasn't changed—for Twitter and for me.

Before I do that, though, let's look at how Twitter has grown in the past year. According to The Nielsen Company, the number of unique visitors to Twitter increased by 579%, from 2.7 million to 18.1 million, between December 2008 and December 2009. (In comparison, Facebook had more than 100 million visitors in December '09.) So clearly they're well beyond the early adopter phase.

At the same time, Nielsen published a study last April that showed that about 60% of users quit using the service a month after signing up. (I haven't been able to find any more recent stats around abandonment rates. If you're aware of any, please send them to me and I'll update the post.) I would venture that the rate probably hasn't changed dramatically and will still have a lot to do with some of the factors I outlined last year.

The Usability Factor

Twitter's usability still sucks. In fact, it probably sucks worse than it did back then because they had fewer features to make difficult to use. Now, every time they add a feature, they make the service less appealing. I already wrote about the disaster that was their response to adding a retweet function to their own site. Likewise, last December they introduced Twitter lists, which was a great idea, but good luck trying to figure out how to work with them. (My tips here.) And the second most common search driving people to this blog is still people trying to figure out why their hash tags aren't showing up in searches. (My solutions here.)

Their poor interface design has been a boon to third-party developers who have created applications like TweetDeck, a desktop client that I use, and HootSuite, a web-based service that I don't use but which many of my friends love. More social media sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn, are also integrating Twitter into their own services giving users even more options for updating their Twitter streams.

I don't know what percentage of Twitterers continue to use their own website, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover they make up the bulk of the people who end up abandoning it. Twitter does have a page listing third-party applications, but it's not that easy to find (shocker!). They might want to bump up its visibility so new users don't get so frustrated that they end up abandoning it altogether.

The Security Factor

When I posted last year, it was just a couple of weeks after two major security breaches had been announced. Just last Friday, Twitter announced that they were removing a Flash-based widget from their site that included a security vulnerability—that had been known about since 2006. In this ReadWriteWeb article, author Sarah Perez notes:

If anything, a news story about yet another Twitter security threat almost seems like a non-event these days, given how many issues the company has faced over the few short years they've been in operation."

Of course, Twitter isn't the only online service subject to security threats. But if you already have a large contingent of people who aren't perceiving a great value to what you offer, throw in some highly publicized security concerns and you're unlikely to entice them to come back and stay.

The AQ (Annoying Quotient) Factor

On the positive side, I think this is less of a problem nowadays. While there are still plenty of people posting stuff that you can't imagine anyone being interested in, the third-party tools are making it much easier to organize your stream so you can filter out the noise and just see the stuff that does interest you. For example, I have a column in TweetDeck called Most Interesting that just has people I follow whose posts I have historically found most interesting. I add people into it and remove them at different times, so it's not a static list. But I still have my column of All Friends when I want to see what's going on among my Twitter community as a whole. Even on twitter.com, now, you can save searches that let you quickly find tweets on topics of interest.

Nowadays, the bigger annoyance is the spam factor. For some reason (knock on wood), I haven't been hit badly by it, but I know lots of people who have finally decided to try Twitter, only to immediately start receiving spammy messages that make them close their accounts on the spot. So that's definitely an area Twitter needs to focus on more if they want to keep growing at the record pace they have been.

The Lack of Customer Support Factor

To be honest, because I do use TweetDeck instead of twitter.com, I haven't really had to deal with Customer Support much, so I don't know if it has improved at all. If you've had any experiences with them lately—good or bad—I'd love to hear about them!

The One Trick Pony Factor

While it's still true that you can only do one thing on Twitter—post 140-character updates—I don't find that quite so limiting anymore. For one thing, you can find links to articles and photos that add extra value to the tweets themselves. For another, now I'm often interacting with it through an application that integrates other social media, so I'm rarely doing something just on Twitter. And when you do want to get a simple message out to huge number of people, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better medium to do so (see Protests, Iran). Another example can be seen in this NYT article just posted today:

Twitter Could Become the Unemployed's Best Friend

According to one person quoted in the article, "It’s the most powerful recruiting tool I’ve ever used."

So, with all that, do I think you need to be on Twitter? In a word, No. I do see more value in it today than I did a year ago, but I don't think people are missing out on anything that essential if they're not using it. As I said then, it's always good to be familiar with how new technologies work, so I would definitely check it out if you haven't. But I wouldn't lose any sleep if you decide it's not for you.

What do you think? Is Twitter a must-have or are you still in the "I don't get it" camp? Or maybe, like me, you're somewhere in-between. I'd love to hear your opinions. Please share your comments below!

Posted in My Two Cents, Social Media, TweetDeck, Twitter, Updates