Robert Scoble is a big fan of Twitter, make no mistake about it. The Web personality and technology guru blogged over the weekend, sharing his thoughts about Twitter, which can be summed up with his post’s title: “why Twitter is underhyped and is probably worth five to 10 billion dollars.” His attention-grabbing (and traffic-driving) headline hammers his POV home, but the full post is worth a look-see. His points include this bold (if unsupported) statement: “Twitter has taken over the business world and this should be very worrying for other companies like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and others.” Not surprisingly, Scoble’s thoughts were picked up by just about everyone in the digerati by Monday. After some reflection, I for one, am calling B.S.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter for real-time communication. It’s fantastic for sharing and picking up new ideas. It rocks for getting a feel for trending topics. But it is by no means a perfect medium. 

Twitter still feels very much like a disjointed conversation with many threads. Everyone is talking but how do you listen to all the chatter? It's like sitting at my family's table at a holiday with all nine of my siblings (and myself) talking over each other-- Grandma might be sharing a great story, but how do you hear it? And then there's the site iteself: it can be buggy, the interface has its flaws, and its internal search is not that user-friendly, particularly for those new to the service. 

I think interface flaws are the root of Twitter’s user-retention troubles, much discussed ever since those retention metrics came out in early summer. While Scoble’s partly right in saying “Twitter has won and is winning big time with businesses,” he’s only half-accurate: Twitter has won with some businesses, but far from the majority of businesses. And many are only tapping Twitter's possibilities as a PR tool rather than utilizing it as a conversation starter with customers. In his piece, Scoble goes on to count Facebook’s flaws, including its branding troubles and lack of permanence. 

Even if Twitter starts charging for business services as it has widely predicted to, that revenue stream will be limited to the companies that are deriving a clear value from it and feel the upgrades are worth opting for a premium service over what everyone else is getting for free.

As All Facebook’s Nick O'Neill points out in a follow-up to Scoble's rant, “if you are advising companies what to do, you should tell them to go where the conversation is and where their customers are.”  The dot dot dot there is customers are on Facebook, in droves. Without jumping into the Twitter vs Facebook debate myself, I’ll say I agree with O’Neill’s statement going where conversation resides. I like Twitter, but I don't believe it will own the conversation until it fixes some of its flaws. Until Twitter figures out a better way to turn many monologues into a meaningful dialogue, Scoble’s lofty valuation is nothing but hot air. Or about $5-10 billion in Monopoly money. Source: Scobelizer, more and All Facebook, more