Has Twitter jumped the shark?
Go to Google News and search for Twitter and you will find over 3200 articles. The good news, most are positive reports on the way the social platform has changed collaborative communication on the Web. Lately, however, Twitter has been suffering a meltdown. The good news is they are keeping us informed and being honest about their infrastructure handicaps and what they are doing to fix it. But is it all too late?
Twitter has been around since 2006, but got its kick start at SXSW 2007. Anybody who is anybody got hip to the ability to share their comings and goings in real time. Originally targeted to the mobile messaging market, it quickly took foot everywhere. And that is what some say is causing some of their pains. Some labeled this form of instant messaging a little too voyeuristic for its own good. Others embraced it as the newest channel for news and stories from the interwebs. Hundreds of would-be developers have tapped into Twitter’s API and built a slew of services, from integrated posting clients to tools for running metrics on your tweets. Businesses and journalists are using it as a communication tool. Whatever you think about it, clearly this form of collaboration has changed the way we communicate with our friends online.
Over the past few days, Twitter itself is abuzz with talk of Plurk and Pownce. Plurk seems like the new kid on the block, wooing away twitterati at the rate of a fire sale. It, too, is suffering a bit of the reliability bug, however. Pownce has been on the scene about as long as Twitter but with a little less visibility. That is quickly changing. And FriendFeed has even been touted as the new Twitter, and gaining ground. All in all, someplace will need to absorb the friends-lounge that Twitter has become. I hope that that hangout will continue to be our old friend Twitter.
What Twitter needs now is to stay the course. Users will stick by the Twitter team if they continue to provide ample, trusting communication. We’ve all come to love this little venue to share our life to friends, and strangers, and will stick by the old friend in time of need. What Twitter needs to do, however, is communicate clear plans to how it will improve or risk loosing it’s true supporters to any of the competitors named above. Many sites and tools have ended up in the deadpool because of infrastructure issues, and many more jumped the shark early in their life. Please, Twitter, keep it going.
For what it is worth, you can find me on Twitter here, Plurk here and Pownce here. I’m spreading mah oats, just in case.
June 3rd, 2008 at 8:57 am
Agreed Don. What we need is not another Twitter, but a better, mores table existing Twitter.
The problem with Plurk, Pownce, FriendFeed and the like are that they weren’t developed as a messaging service (exactly the reason that Twitter is having scaling issues right now). I think Twitter is much less the virtual water cooler, it’s something much different.
And the truth is, if Twitter took a dive, most of the conversations that exist on FriendFeed right now wouldn’t continue…because a lot of the conversation is generated from Twitter…
Good post. You should look into Intense Debate or Disqus as a comment replacement system. They’re both pretty awesome and will have some wicked Socialthing! integration really soon…
June 3rd, 2008 at 8:58 am
I think one of the main issues with other services is that they try to be twitter++. I think Twitter has become so popular because it does what it does, and only what it does. Prior to these reliability issues, it did it very well too. If there was an exact clone of Twitter, or if it became some kind of official protocol that could be reused without reinventing the wheel, I think it would still rule over those other services.
What’s the programming adage? Create discrete functions and string them together instead of massive functions that do everything? Something like that? Twitter fulfills a very specific need without the other frills (although the timeline is cool on Plurk). I too hope they can fix their reliability issues before people begin to bail. But all of our eyes have been opened to this form of communication, so if Twitter dies, then someone WILL come out with Twitter 2.0, although I pray they use another name instead!
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:42 am
There are a lot of nice features in Plurk (the timeline, the UI, support for images and youtube videos) but the one thing I hear coming from the buzz about plurk is it’s likeness to Myspace. On a certain level I can see that, with some of the “clique” terminology and horrible copy writing. Who knows, it may be too early to tell.
Personally I’m fine with Twitter as long as they are able to keep the down time to a minimum. I feel like I owe it to them to stick it out and give them a chance to make improvements. You’ve probably read this but here is an interesting article on Twitter’s outages: http://tinyurl.com/6athqc How they’ve been able to survive with a single MySQL server is a modern miracle.
Are you planning on creating an account? Staying with Twitter? I’d be interested to know. I’d like to see some stats on the number of Twitter users that made the switch to plurk in the last few days.
June 3rd, 2008 at 1:25 pm
I’m staying loyal to Twitter. I find the outages to be a minor annoyance at this point and I too hope Twitter can fix the problem(s); and I second Jason’s suggestion, please don’t call it Twitter 2.0.
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