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The Australian: Twitter will fail because it doesn’t create communities like newspapers do

The Australian has predicted that social networking site Twitter will fail despite the current buzz around it.  

Behold: "the platform of the information age"

Behold: "the platform of the information age"

The newspaper dedicates one of its two main leader columns today to a lengthy piece headlined “Time Is Up For Twitter” suggesting that the social networking site is “spluttering out” because it “lacks content to create communities”.

According to the newspaper: “Certainly Twitter has generated a pandemic of popularity, but it appears many people quickly decide Twitter is tedious, with 60 per cent of new users becoming ex-users in a month.”

The paper also widens its attack on other media to reality TV and blogs, saying: “Obviously there is an adolescent interest in the mundane minutiae of the Biggest Loser, but watching and blogging about it is hardly enduring entertainment.”

And YouTube – owned by Google – also comes under the paper’s gaze, saying it “chews through vast amounts of bandwidth and more money”.

Instead, argues The Australian, newspapers are the enduring medium. It states: “Melbourne’s Herald Sun engages every day with close to 1.5 million people who are passionate about football and care for their city. And because the product is convenient and the content is appealing, the paper is a community that people pay to belong to.”

The Australian is owned by News Corp, which also owns MySpace and The Herald Sun.

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