Twitterific Or Twitterrible?

There?s Twitter. There?s Radar. There?s Jaiku. And there must be a great many other much smaller, less noted services of the same vein. What vein? Mobile social networking. Or is it the publication of various streams of consciousness for all to see? Actually, when you really get down to it, all of the above are outlets made to allow a lot of people to talk about themselves to a lot of other people in an incoherent and entirely meaningless way. There ? within Twitter, Radar, Jaiku, etc.; take your pick – individuals speak of everything to such an extent river ends up comprised only of a whole lot of nothing.

Today, in a story published in the Business Day section of The New York Times, Brad Stone and Matt Richtel parse the world of mobile blogging and mobile networking to see whether the sites currently dominating the genre are worth the attention, and to speak about a recent entry, Kyte, begun by Daniel Graf, among others. The creators of Kyte hope to turn ?millions of cameraphone owners? into television broadcasters. Hopefully. Or, ?potentially,? according to Stone?s and Richtel?s article.

If you learned of Kyte prior to reading this piece, chances are you felt the same way as I do now: It simply will not work. As much as people like to broadcast themselves on YouTube, most don?t want to start their own television networks. First and foremost because the stuff they have to “sell”, well, sucks. And they know it. That is after all why so many do in fact upload asinine items to the video hosts of the Web. To string clips of that sort together would be…a great waste of time. For viewer, broadcaster, and creator alike.

Which leads me to my critique of these new ?developments?. Developments meaning Twitter, Radar, Jaiku, Kyte, etc. My conclusion is really very elementary, but it?s undoubtedly the truth: They are all a great waste of time. Why do I say that?

For one, they serve no benefit to anyone. Social networks like MySpace, however banal they have become over the last year or two, do benefit some. They connect friends, friends of friends, and so on. They are also a boon to musicians, comedians, actors, etc. of both the amateur and professional variety. And– Well, that?s all I can think to list in the ?Good? column.

Mobile social networks, at least of the kind that the abovementioned are said to be a part, simply aren?t sophisticated enough to be worth the energy ? and cost.

Cost will surely impede on the growth and development of these businesses. As MySpace and the rest exist for the most part within our PC- and laptop-based browsers, they do not cost the user a penny to utilize. This is primarily because youth make up the vast majority of their ranks and youth do not pay for Internet access. Their elders do. Not too many adults would be too keen on providing broadband connections to PCs and cellular phones for their youth, I presume. (This is said with the majority of the user bases of social networking services in mind, of course.)

Most important, however, is the time spent contributing to and consuming the large streams of nothingness. Services like Twitter and Jaiku and Kyte are all exciting and great when they?re fresh. But as things get crowded, the broadcast of a vast slew of things pertaining to anything imaginable is bound to reach a breaking point, at which individuals thought to be very interested in one or even several of the popular vehicles of the day abandon ship.

If the aforementioned services wish to survive past this PR blitz they?re running on, they need to quickly carve out their respective niches and develop services that indeed serve a purpose. Otherwise, it's goodbye Radar, goodbye Jaiku, goodbye Twitter, and goodbye Kyte. Which wouldn?t be so bad, would it?