Is Twitter doomed?

Twitter, doomed, you say?  What gives?  I thought this was the next big thing?  Bigger than email, right?  I mean, I just tweeted from the delivery room that I named by new baby "Tweet."  Bad move??

Okay, well maybe "doomed" is too strong of a word.  Twitter is not going away and still is entrenching itself firmly into the lexicon of that group of people we so technically refer to as, "almost everybody."

But hear me out on this one.  There have been plenty of concerns over the past year about the proper direction for Twitter to move and what the next big step for Twitter should look like.  Mashable reported last month that Twitter's #'s have flatlined for several months, just as they should be picking up steam.  Why is it happening?  Is it just a glitch or a concerning trend?

Several bloggers and commenters in the Mashable community point to the size constraints and "stripped down" features of Twitter vs. Facebook.  I think that's part of the story.  But my take is more that Twitter is harder to explain to people and harder to get "everybody you know" to use it, as opposed to facebook.  With less to do and less "clutter" than facebook, you'd think that "less is more" would help Twitter.  But in fact, it's just the opposite.  You can only "sell" FB or Twitter so much to somebody until they just have to go on and do it themselves.  Once they do, Facebook is much more self-explanatory, whereas Twitter often elicits an "okay, now what am I supposed to do with this?" response.

Twitter is fantastic for broadcasting to an audience (i.e. celebrities) and for everyday people to get news and info from celebrities and/or media outlets.  HOWEVER, it is difficult for the average Joe to build an audience and thus, find good reason to Tweet regularly.  I know many people who created Twitter accounts and then abandoned them shortly thereafter because they "didn't get it" or simply "did not see the point."  But with Facebook, once you get a friend to join, they usually get sucked in and latch on easily.

Unless you have a business to market or an existing audience derived from another medium, it is very difficult to embrace Twitter (as an active tweeter, not follower).  In essence, Twitter is at risk of defaulting to "just another broadcasting medium," a "one-way street" if you will, as opposed to Facebook, which is a truer embodiment of the multi-directional "connect" aspects of a social media tool.