May 27 2009
Twitter TV: 140 Characters of Suck
So, Twitter is going to be joining forces with Reveille Productions and Brillstein Entertainment Partners for a television show. And yes, it’s going to be as bad as you first assumed when I mentioned Twitter TV: It’s going to be a celebrity stalking reality gameshow.
I will now go exfoliate with a belt sander.
I know it’s probably going to be on Fox, and I know it’s probably going to be a huge flop, but this is exactly the kind of attention Twitter DOES NOT need. When you’re not making any money, you at least want to keep a core group of audience that you can direct ads at (when you finally run out of venture capital). Twitter isn’t GM; people are lining up to give money to Twitter for no good reason, so why the rush to whore the service so hard?
Throwing the doors open for the crowds when you can barely handle your daily traffic is probably a bad idea. This is the sort of stunt Twitter should be pulling after they’ve figured out how to monetize the surface, not before they can afford to pay for upgrades. If Oprah’s army of bored housewives can crash Twitter, I shudder to think what any decently-sized TV debut for this show would do to the service.
It took a long time for Twitter to get respect as a legitimate, useful tool, and it only takes one incredibly stupid decision to ruin all that positive groundwork.
