Scientist Tim Berners-Lee of World Wide Web Consortium in 2000. Picture: AP Source: AP
- "Extreme tweets ruining social media site"
- Father of the WWW follows just 83 people
- Call comes as study reveals Twitter quitters
TOO many extreme opinions could mean Twitter has a limited future, according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.
Sir Berners-Lee said Twitter's 140 character meant it was not a place where you could have "reasoned discussion".
"All the tweets were extreme," he told an internet conference in London.
When asked whether Twitter would be part of the future of the web, the 55-year-old tech icon said something more sophisticated was needed.
It's not the first time Sir Berners-Lee has taken a shot at social networks.
In an article in Scientific American last year, he said sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn were a threat to the internet because they locked down user information and stopped sharing across the web.
University of Canberra social networking researcher Dr Jason Wilson said Sir Berners-Lee's comments came from someone who didn't use Twitter properly.
"I think we're just beginning to get a handle on things like Twitter and I think he's wrong if he says that it's not being used for people to share information that's quite considered," Dr Wilson said.
Sir Berners-Lee's Twitter account @timberners_lee today had more than 45,000 followers, but he only followed only 83.
The controversial comments came as a US study of more than 1500 people found that almost half of respondents who had opened a Twitter account had later stopped using it.
The top three reasons given for leaving Twitter were that it was "pointless", it got "boring" and it was "too chaotic", said email marketing firm ExactTarget.
With staff writers
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