They Keep Following Me! What is the True Twitter Value?

So Twitter still hasn't figured out a business model, but from my personal experience these last few months they have continued to grow. I, however, question the value of that growth.

You see, I have used Twitter a handful of times, mainly to get the feel for it when it first started. I quickly lost interest, as I did not really feel the need to broadcast my location or thoughts on an instant basis throughout the day (and night...). And for a few minutes "followed" the Twitter output of a few friends (and some folks I thought looked interesting). I stopped following because I felt the information I was receiving was beyond boring, or made me feel like I was eavesdropping.

Then over the past few months I started to receive "________ is following you" notifications from Twitter. Over the past few weeks its at least 1-2 a day. Shows the power of ongoing viral spread. Most of it is of very low value, as shown in my case. People are not choosing to follow me, but rather are signing up for Twitter, and then simply pressing "next, next, next," and automatically Twitter signs them up to follow anyone found in their contacts that has a Twitter account...in other words, they become stalkers without even knowing it. While this is growth of the Twitter "network," it is very low (to zero) value). It is one step away from spam.

On the other hand, had a different experience with Twitter last week, which was high value and quite positive. As you know, I spend less than zero time promoting my blog, but here and there it still gets out. I recently wrote a posting about managing a start-up during these difficult financial market conditions, called Running on Empty, which got picked up by  Guy Kawasaki in one of his twitter broadcasts (not even in his blog !).  I saw an immediate surge in readership, hundreds of people came to my blog simply because Guy had included reference to it in a "twit" (or is it "tweat?").

Now here I think i start to see the real value of Twitter. Not as a way to know when my long lost cousin is crossing the street, but rather to get up to date suggestions from Gurus as to what I should be looking at. That sounds like something I would even pay for...and I'm a cheap guy!

In the old days there was a thriving newsletter business, where smart people published newsletters, and sold very high-end subscriptions -- because there was recognized value in the content, based on the author.

Twitter is poised to transform from a Spam machine into a nex-gen broadcasting service, but they need to stop with the annoying (and devoid of value) network creation, and go back to the old model, of targeted audience paying to hear what their oracle[s] have to say.