Needless to say, the answer didn't work for him, and it doesn't work for me now that I think about it harder.
Some reasons?
The fall out of Facebook's beacon advertising fiasco is certainly one. Turns out people on social networks care about privacy after all. Evidently, they weren't thrilled that their friends could view their transactions on the internet over their newsfeeds.
Turns out, this upcoming generation of teens and twenty-somethings (whose say will matter most) doesn't want to share every piece of information about themselves with everyone. Instead, they want to share some things with a certain group they chose, which Facebook now allows them to set with great granularity and specificity (something Twitter doesn't do particularly well in its Web-based version).
The second problem is Twitter's user base. While it has broadened to include some non tech companies and even politicians like Sen. Barack Obama and John McCain, the early users of Twitter have made the service impenetrable to someone who is late to the game and who has broader interests beyond technology and social media.
And because it's unlikely non-techies will get very many of their friends to join right away, they're going to have do their initial Twitter interactions with this existing user base. Since it would be natural for me to follow techy people, I tried to reinforce this presumption the other day by clicking on the "everyone" tab.
Sure enough, within the first page:
"Just finished watching 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' for the first time. 10 years later that film tells a much more interesting tale"
"LowPro [a scripting tool] is nice in theory, but I have to relearn how it works every time I go to use it. Frustrating."
"blogging about reflecting as an approach to social media"
"Posted a few blog updates, still raining off/on, may not be over with TS Fay yet if it swings back around and it may grow stronger?"
Twitter's technology would be more useful within a more general social medium (such as Facebook). Of course, you can add the Twitter app to Facebook. As an example, my friends outside of the professional world do read my Twitter updates on Facebook, and comment on them there, but they haven't felt compelled to join the service themselves.
And with a lot of the tweets I see everyday, I can see why.
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