Twitter is back and won’t be beat
Not sure if you’ve noticed it, but Twitter has reached critical mass. At the end of last year, Twitter was little more than the latest toy for techno geeks and PR teams. In short, it was little more than a diversion. But, things change as they often do, and Twitter started to gain some ground early 2008 as something more than a geeky tech toy. It actually became a viable method of communication for the “always-on” tech community. Now it’s starting to spread outward from there.
Their early success led to some pretty disastrous scaling problems and growing pains, which made 
their “Fail Whale” infamous. Twitter was down so much in the early to late Spring, there were more than a few people who decided to dump the service and move over to the fast growing, more stable, and ex-Google-exec-backed FriendFeed. But, in the back of my mind, I knew there was something special about a product that drew so much attention, that even its failures were an opportunity [for someone] to make money.
Credit Twitter’s founders for making the right moves. If your product doesn’t scale well and your engineering team can’t figure out how to fix those problems – fire them, and find more capable people. There’s no reason to try and rearrange the deck chairs on the Titantic. In the end, do what is right for your business – no matter the human cost.
Well, the plan worked. The Twitter team hunkered down and “fixed the glitch” that was causing problems and the following few months culminated in an early September Nielsen Online report detailing a gigantic 422% growth of unique visitors to Twitter from the same period last year. Numbers don’t lie, which led even the perennially-negative Mike Arrington at TechCrunch to (tentatively) declare that “the worst of Twitter’s scalabilty issues are behind them.”
Nowadays, I’m a regular Twitter user again. I don’t use FriendFeed, or Plurk, or Pownce, or any of the other Twitter-clones out there. The release of popular clone Identi.ca, which seemed like a possible deathblow in early July, now seems insignificant at best. Twitter isn’t about technology, you see – it’s about community. The Brits have showed us that driving on the left-hand side of the road doesn’t offer any real technological driving advantage to the right-hand side. Instead, the power lies in the fact that no matter where you inside a given country, you can always count on everyone driving on the SAME side of the road.
Twitter has the critical mass of community, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it can’t be beat by FriendFeed (I don’t even use it anymore), or newcomers like Identi.ca, or anyone else, unless the founders do something royally stupid. But even if they do, it might not matter. Prevailing critical opinion is that Twitter founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams have a little more than luck on their side.
What do you think? Does Twitter have us right where they want us, or are they still ripe for the picking? Or, let me put it another way – which of you regularly uses a micro-blogging service that’s NOT Twitter?
Twitter has come a long way since the early spring of constant fail whales…and I too tried migrating to other services but the thing was that I already had my community built on Twitter and didn’t have the persuasive power, like some “power tweeters” had, to bring my following with me. So I stuck it out with a fail whale 5 times a day.
What I find that twitter really lacks is the ability to follow comment threads in their site. It very annoying to see an @reply on a tweet that has nothing to do with what someone is saying because they replied to a tweet from an hour ago…its hard to follow. Other than that…twitter makes me squeal with glee!
I stepped in to the realm of micro-blogging for the express purpose of supporting the efforts at Identi.ca, who are great folks doing great work. In the beginning, I had no personal interest in micro-blogging heavily per se. But I did have an interest in supporting open source technology projects.
However, as it turns out, as soon as I began to actully enjoy micro-blogging for its own sake (it didn’t take long), I found that I longed for a more robust and interesting community. While I still think that Identi.ca’s open source model has allowed for faster development of features in response to community feedback, I am now a twitter addict for the express reason that you so cogently stated: Twitter isn’t about technology, you see – it’s about community.