I am skeptical about all the hype around Twitter. I like Twitter and find that it’s an effective way of letting my followers know what I am up to, but it’s not much more than that. It’s not a great real time search engine. The information is too “spammy” and confusing.

The hype around Twitter reminds me about the hype around SecondLife a few years ago. SecondLife has turned into a great business, but it has not revolutionized the Internet or social networking. I suspect Twitter will become a successful business as well, if only by putting Adsense around its search results.

However, I have a hard time seeing it become more than that. It’s just not as useful as a site like Facebook. I had a similar criticism of SecondLife. Contrarily to a game like World of Warcraft, SecondLife has no objective which makes it harder to retain user engagement.

Comparing Facebook and Twitter, over 50% of Facebook’s 200 million active users login every day. 60% of Twitter users stop using it after a month. I personally find Facebook much more relevant to my personal life – I like seeing pictures, relationship status changes, etc.

They might confound me, but my bet is that will become a successful interesting site, but not much more than that.