the trouble with baseless tech predictions, or did i miss google+ killing facebook?

Oh, those heady crazy days when any technology is introduced. I remember the original buzz (not to be confused with Buzz) over Google+, as a wave (not to be confused with Wave) of excitement swept through social media as people asked anyone, everyone they knew for an invitation to the new community.

Some early coverage and commentary took the oh-so-levelheaded tone of OMGOMGGoogle+IsGoingToKillFacebook, despite any tangible evidence or empirical projections. So what happened since?

Facebook is still alive, and confounding users with incremental redesigns, as usual. People complain about said redesigns, as they always do, then move on and keep using the service.

And Google+ has nice membership numbers, although postings I’ve seen have slowed precipitously. The recent announcement that Google+ was now open to all, no invite necessary, was greeted in many spheres of social media with a collective yawn, as if the site were already yesterday’s news. Perhaps in part because Facebook has already rolled features to counter G+ assets. Some of the same folks who trumpeted the ascendance of G+ now treat it as a punchline. Its hangouts, message segregation via Circles and Google tie-ins still hold promise, but the hosannas have long since stopped rattling.

So is Google+ primed to surpass and supercede Facebook? Not today or tomorrow.

Will Google+ eventually pass Facebook in terms of membership or primacy? Cannot predict now. Ask again later.

Actually, the “Cannot predict now” and “Ask again later” phrases I took from my Magic 8 Ball. The Magic 8 Ball says that a lot.

And you know: We should say and acknowledge that line of reasoning instead of making grand and unfounded declarations. We — earlier adopters, the technology press, the general social mediacracy — should stop pretending the latest shiny object is the New Facebook or the Next Twitter. And for the sake of all that is good, anyone who uses the term “game changer” for a brand new technology should have their iPhone confiscated.

Because the future of technology is a lot of things — surprising, exciting, complicated and unpredictable. It’s NOT as cut and dried as saying “this new technology is cool, my friends are excited, so it’s going to be the next [insert the previous next thing].” Because no one really knows. We cannot predict now. Ask again later.

jump-tweeting to conclusions.

I’m repeatedly amazed how, when the subject is Twitter, writers and readers will jump to all kinds of conclusions from any scrap of information, however suspicious or specious.

The latest came in the form of a Wall Street Journal blog entry titled Is Gen Y Tweeting?, which immediately was linked and retweeted throughout the Twittersphere. But looking at this article about the most fictionalized modern generation shows there’s less than meets the eye, and makes one question the common sense of serial RTers.

The headline conclusion found the oversimplified group known as Gen Y just isn’t that into tweeting, as only 22% of 18- to 24-year-olds used Twitter. Well, sort of. According to one study. And one with a laughably small sample size. A marketing firm partnered with Pace University’s business school on the study, and polled the 200 Generation Y-ers — mostly Pace students — on their social-media habits, according to the story.

Hang on. Is 200 a sufficient sample size to categorize the habits of millions? Moreover, such a homogeneous group mostly at one college? (Not to get too deep into statistics, but the margin of error for such a small, uniform sample would provide a very low confidence level of interpolating the result to such a large population.)

Remember that Twitter, like any social-media manifestation, is viral in nature. Most of us start using it because others we know use it. Malcolm Gladwell, in his much-read The Tipping Point, notes that for anything to go viral, you need mavens — who discover and share information — to interact with connectors, who spread the word to others. This cultivation of any movement, including Twitter, varies by location and introductory forces.

Example: Until I showed a Music Business class on our campus about Twitter, I knew of no students who tweeted. Some of those students started using Twitter, told friends, who told their friends and now I see a lot of our students on Twitter. It’s quite possible colleges with more mavens and connectors have double the Pace user base, while others may be well lower. But to draw conclusions on one isolated geographical population is to ignore what we should know about social media and how actions spread.

In a related development, I discovered the Wall Street Journal is on Twitter, so I can confidently interpolate that 100% of print publications have Twitter accounts. Seems just as valid a conclusion.

twitter abandonment issues?

Since anything involving Twitter these days makes news (for good or ill), much fanfare greeted last week’s report by Nielsen Online that 60 percent of new Twitterers abandoned the popular microblogging site after 30 days. The haters rejoiced, Twitter fans cried foul and the 140-character engine that could had another turbulent trip through popular discussion.

While the exponential growth of Twitter means an overall net gain, the report’s author David Martin noted a lack of retention represents a longterm challenge to the community: By plotting the minimum retention rates for different Internet audience sizes, it is clear that a retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure, he blogged. To be clear, a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.

And while some questioned the methodology, which Martin later tweaked and defended, common sense provides several possibilities for so-called Twitter quitters. Many who jumped aboard because of the media hype, expecting the best thing since sliced bread, may not have realized the amount of activity required for a fulfilling Twitter experience. Those adding due to the celebrity/glamour angle may have despaired upon learning that, even in Web 2.0, their favorite stars still don’t actually talk to them. (And Oprah virtually abandoning her tweeting likely left her fans unsure of what to do next.) Marketers who stampeded onto Twitter may have not realized that neither traditional hawking nor get-rich-quick schemes are all that welcome or trusted.

I also think about studies involving college students, which find those who make quality connections more likely to stay in school. What kept me on Twitter? Not hype, not novelty, not voyeurism but real people, connections and conversations. Those just don’t happen right away. As I’ve explored in Twitter 101 and Twitter 102: The Twitterduction, finding good tweeps takes time, effort and interaction. Facebook, by comparison, is much easier. We may interact in micro form but Twitter is, by no means, a place of easy instant gratification.

It’s sort of a shame that, in a world where every Twitter twist and turn makes news, the media didn’t look too far behind the headline for reasons. Maybe some journalists’ attention spans can’t get past 140 characters now.