I’ve been inspired recently to resuscitate my months-neglected Twitter account as an experiment because I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion on various blogs and FriendFeed touting all the benefits of being active with Twitter such as crowdsourcing, socialization and meeting new people with common interests. Most of these posters list their favorite Twitter services in a “quickstart” guide and seem to heavily imply that it’s easy to get set up and quickly reap the benefits.

But the Twitter evangelists seem to be either social networking A-listers who generate massive, nearly instant audiences in whatever service they sign up with or they are people who spend several hours a day cultivating their networks by actively monitoring and responding to tweets and putting a lot of original tweets out themselves or both.

The problem is that Twitter can be a pretty lonely and discouraging service if you don’t have any followers and the people you’re interested in don’t follow you back. You can’t have a conversation if no one is listening to respond. How do you even reach out to people that you’d like to have conversations with if they don’t follow you? You can’t direct message them and there’s not even a guarantee that they’ll see your @replies. To be successful at Twitter you have to spend a lot of time making a reputation for yourself and hope that the people you follow notice and return the follow. Chances seem slim unless you put incredible amounts of persistence and ego stroking into it to capture their attention.

And that’s why Twitter won’t ever be mainstream. Early adopters are techno masochists but other people aren’t. We’re often willing to put in an amazing amount of time and effort into new services and put up with a lot of frustration from them with even the smallest amount of perceived benefit. But everyone else is more sensible. They don’t have the time or motivation to build a successful Twitter network, and they never will with its current implementation. I see some of the same problems with the social aspect of FriendFeed, despite opinions to the contrary.

I’m going to keep trying for a while, with some good advice on the how instead of the why, and see if I can get my tweets out of the echo chamber, but I couldn’t honestly recommend Twitter to my coworkers or family members at this point because I know they wouldn’t be willing to spend the time and effort to make it benefit them. I see value in the idea of the service. I think eventually, once we get filters and intelligent agents to be our attention guardians we’ll be able to have good two-way conversations without the whole follower/followee model. At that point, Twitter will just have turned into a framework or protocol, but obviously it’s going to be a while before that happens.

Maybe I’m missing something and the Twitter-ken can tell me what I’m doing wrong. Please feel free to enlighten me!