Twitter May Not Have To Care About Uptime Any Longer

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1. Louis Gray
   

   April 22nd, 2008 at 12:46 am

   Smart comments. I believe Twitter and FriendFeed can both be big winners in the long run, and that one’s success does not preclude the other. But it was interesting to see folks reacting to the intermittent nature of Twitter this weekend, each in their own way.

2. Dennis Howlett
   

   April 22nd, 2008 at 12:47 am

   Interesting take Mike but it only works in the Valley. Outside of Bubblesville I”m not sure anyone cares. See: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=377 - if they want to go global plus have aspirations to doing business then reliability really does matter. IMO. More important, how much of this kind of outage are you prepared to tolerate before moving to alternative services like FriendFeed?

3. Ryan Spahn
   

   April 22nd, 2008 at 12:50 am

   Is there a Twitter app where I can search a topic and view all tweets from day one? I dont want to spend thousands on market research when I could just use a Twitter tool to do such. Of course this tool could provide graphs and pie charts and boom all my work is done or simplified!

   Thanks in advance for creating that…

4. Igor The Troll
   

   April 22nd, 2008 at 12:51 am

   Mike, Twitter Owns you.

5. Michael Arrington
   

   April 22nd, 2008 at 12:52 am

   Dennis - I answered, or attempted to answer, your question in the actual post. It’s the whole point of the post actually. Friendfeed is great for keeping track of an information stream. Twitter is about conversations. very different things.

6. Robert Scoble
   

   April 22nd, 2008 at 12:52 am

   I don’t disagree. I’m still on Twitter too. But I find that something HAS happened over on FriendFeed that never happened with other Twitter competitors like Jaiku and Pownce: people ARE using it in a big way.

   The thing is, FriendFeed really isn’t trying to be a competitor to Twitter. It’s an aggregator. But, by being more reliable than Twitter it’s getting a lot of us to come over and try it out and we’re noticing it is getting stronger network effects than Twitter did, thanks to commenting and “liking” over there.

   It’s also growing a lot faster than Twitter is, at least in my view of the two.

7. Robert Scoble
   

   April 22nd, 2008 at 12:54 am

   Mike: I think if you look into FriendFeed, or if you follow more people there, you’ll see there’s actually a different kind of conversation happening on FriendFeed (one that uses threaded conversations that join up multiple tools). Funny, too, that my Twitter messages kept getting seen there, even when they weren’t over on Twitter.

8. moeffju
   

   April 22nd, 2008 at 12:54 am

   I think you’re not popular enough. When I launched my Twitter client, your tweet was on the first page. Oh, and, I agree.

9. Paul Montgomery
   

   April 22nd, 2008 at 12:56 am

   This is all very well, but when is Twitter going to start making money, and how? That’s the great unresolved question, I think.

10. Marcin Grodzicki
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 12:57 am

    The problem starts when monopoly thinks it’s invincible - that’s when innovation happens. In twitter’s case I guess the api and integrators are the threat - the same thing happened once in IM with invention of Jabber. Anyone ICQ today?

11. Michael Arrington
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 12:57 am

    Robert - I don’t disagree. But the conversations I see at FriendFeed are different. It’s not a perfect description, but it’s like the FF conversations are asynchronous, whereas I see almost group-chat like synchronous conversations break on on Twitter all the time. They just aren’t competitors in my eyes, and I use both a lot.

12. Jackie Danicki
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 12:57 am

    My guy friends want to know where one signs up for the whole deal where other services “suck off [Twitter] users”.

13. Igor The Troll
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 12:58 am

    Twitter is about Subliminal suggestion, not simple peer to peer communication!

14. Charlie
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 12:58 am

    That’s dumb.

    1. Only geeks know about twitter, yet

    2. There are already tons of apps that suck in, and crosspost status updates to, many services at once.

    3. If the feeling settles into the geek community (twitter’s majority) that twitter sucks and something else ought to replace it, they will make the switch in about one week. Maybe two. These are the people who pick up and play with every little thing that comes along. Not the ones that call AOL ‘the internet’.

15. Igor The Troll
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:01 am

    Charlie, why not start your own social network.

16. Michael Arrington
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:01 am

    Jackie - pull your mind out of the gutter.

    your comment reminds me of this post:

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....i-thought/

17. @MattMusgrave
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:01 am

    i agree with you. i waited patiently all weekend for twitter to return. thought about tumblr, friendfeed, etc, but twitter is where all the ‘cool kids’ hang out. who wants to be the guy standing outside the party looking in? i waited for the music to start back up, and party to resume. rock on!

    btw: found this article on your twitter post. all systems go!

    @MattMusgrave

18. Robert Scoble
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:02 am

    Oh, by the way, I saw your post on Twitter. I am watching Google Talk and it seemed to come through as soon as you wrote it, since when I first came to this page there weren’t any updates. Funny, the first time I tried to comment on this thread Windows Vista bluescreened. I should go back to using my Mac. Sigh.

19. Michael Arrington
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:02 am

    Charlie - I remember when only geeks knew about youtube. Hell, I even remember when only geeks knew about email. that’s just not a credible argument in my world. And I don’t think you understand the power of network effects.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

20. yohannes
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:03 am

    i just don’t see how you can take your personal habit and experience w/ twitter and come to a general trend/conclusion. you got any data supporting your thesis? YOU can’t live without twitter anymore. doesn’t mean that the rest of the world can’t live without it….

21. Thunderror
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:05 am

    Wow..twitter is a phenomenon..we discuss about twitter these days the way google is discussed about..I have come across not less than 5 blogposts during the last few hours…
    I agree, we need twitter than it needs us…

22. Dennis Howlett
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:07 am

    @Mike - Not sure I follow your logic - I’m with Robert on this one insofar as it *is* possible to engage conversationally in FriendFeed and I’d argue it’s not as asynchronous as those that occur on Twitter. Very easy if you’re using the AlertThingy AIR client.

    However - I believe you have to use FriendFeed in a different way. It is drawing from so many sources, the noise level can become unbearable. So for that service I’m deliberately restricting those I add to about 100-120 people with whom I have fairly regular interactions. At that sort of number, I can readily switch people in and out as tastes, requirements etc change. That’s much harder with Twitter, especially if you’re doing what Robert does and follow 000’s of people.

23. Igor The Troll
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:08 am

    I do not think Charlie is getting with the program! On Twitter we do not have to follow each other to spread the Gospel. I follow one guy another guy follow this guy. So you have A, B, C, etc. Now A and B follow each other and B and C follow each other.

    So A wants to contact C how is it done? Friendship Redirect! Send the message to B and he will forward it to C!

    Got it. or not yet? That is the social networking of Twitter! It is Hot!

24. Sebastian
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:09 am

    The thing is … Friendster hat the network effect, too. They were the first and biggest player, but were ultimately crushed by the competition. Twitter hasn’t succeeded, they will have to work on the reliability of their systems until they have 20 or 30 million active users.

25. Charlie
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:09 am

    Mike - my point is that it’s still small, and has to execute well if it’s going to take over the world. It’s like you said, they could take a friendster-like nose dive if people aren’t happy with the service.

    “Public text messaging” is the kind of utility lots of startups are aiming to provide.

26. Stilgherrian
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:09 am

    It’s amazing how short people’s memories are. It ain’t that long ago that Skype had a major outage over several days and pundits predicted they’d die as a result. Didn’t happen.

    Here in Australia, major ISP BigPond had enormous problems with early ADSL rollout, with customers off the air for a day at a time several times a month, yet they’re still the biggest ISP in the country.

    Twitter provides a useful service. Provided that outages get fixed then people soon forget them and continue using the service.

27. John Walker
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:11 am

    Mike,

    This post hit the nail on the head. I’ve been watching and slightly using twitter for the last year. For some reason it all came together for me in March. Call it synergy, or whatever, but even folks I wouldn’t think would use it are using it. Combined with a nice client like Twhirl, brings it to a different experiential level.

    Hooked.

28. Igor The Troll
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:11 am

    Mike this is a better link
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.....ggregation

29. Ryan
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:13 am

    Yeah Twitter is the next huge thing … like email, text messaging, IM, MySpace, etc…

    Also..how many marketing companies wouldn’t want access to search each consumers’ email inbox? Bascially they can now with Twitter … of course the right tools need to be created.

30. Charlie
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:14 am

    Igor - I’m working on it. Aren’t we all?

    p.s.
    Mike, sorry about the “That’s Dumb” comment. I watched your talk at Startup School and I don’t mean to contribute to an uncivil discussion board. I don’t like uncivil discussion boards.

31. Jeff Bezos
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:15 am

    Soooo sad. Comment censored because the truth hurts. You so called “a listers” need to realize you’re not the only humans that make this world go round.

32. Igor The Troll
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:16 am

    Well you need to look at all this as the Twilight Zone.

33. Igor The Troll
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:18 am

    I think the day Twitter becomes reliable and attracks MySpace crowds, we will leave..:)

34. Jeff Bezos
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:18 am

    Your egos are all going to come back to haunt you some day….

35. Charlie
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:19 am

    Igor-
    If that was directed at me, then I’m not sure I follow…

36. Jeff Bezos
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:19 am

    @Igor

    Thanks for the idea! I’m gonna make sure that happens…

37. Michael Arrington
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:22 am

    Charlie - your comments are great! If they were a problem, they’d be deleted. not even close. good discussion. But I really think you should read about network effects if you haven’t already.

38. Igor The Troll
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:24 am

    Charlie, you still not getting with what it is about! It is not about Me, Mike, you, or Joe!

    It is about collective thinking! Cabal.

39. StartupEarth
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:34 am

    @14 Charlie — “That’s dumb.

    1. Only geeks know about twitter, yet”

    I don’t agree, there are a lot of non-geeks on there, and the perceived demographic all comes down to who follows you/who you follow.

    So you might say.. “Only geeks know about Charlie”

40. EH
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:45 am

    LOL, Friendster was not “crushed by the competition.”

41. David
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:51 am

    Well, I am late to this comment stream, so no one will probably read this as the 39th comment… but, Twitter would be so lucky to follow Friendster’s path… a path to success!

    Friendster is the 8th largest website on the planet in terms of traffic — that’s over 16 billion page views in February… to see these stats and more, check out the CNET Asia article at http://asia.cnet.com/blogs/gee.....d=63002914 for some great data on the global stats for social networks.

    The #3 social network in the world and #1 in Asia (where over a third of the Internet population is located) — not bad for a company that started so much just 5 years ago…

42. Christian Anderson
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:56 am

    Agree with Mike that Twitter and FriendFeed are different. Since all conversations lead to Facebook lets put it in that context. Twitter is FB status updates on steroids — leaning more toward group IM. FriendFeed is your FB news feed. Scoble is right. If you pay close enough attention to FriendFeed or your Facebook news feed, you can make out a conversation, IF you are following enough people.

    Twitter + FriendFeed = Facebook

    What could be more interesting is when there is a disqus-like comment client for twitter that links comments on sites like TC and others to Twitter and by extension, FriendFeed. This would capture the conversation Mike and Scoble had both in the comments of this post and tie them to the ‘offline’ conversation they had on the same topic on Twitter.

43. Vidar Hokstad
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 2:04 am

    When Friendster arrived, I yawned. It was nothing new, even though people kept going on about it. I assumed it would fail because of predecessors like Six Degrees back in ‘98 that got “huge” and faded. Of course the audience had increased massively. But I’ve seen dozens of “social” apps rise and fall when “everyone” (usually translating to “everyone _you_ know” rather than anything close to most people) thought they were vital parts of their lives.

    Because of the network effect this also turns into an echo chamber. “Social” sites whether networking sites, IM networks etc. can be a total flop in one country and all encompassing elsewhere, and people in the latter locations will often just extrapolate and assume it’s the same everywhere. We see that with IM networks, where the different networks have widely different penetration in different countries, and many people will be surprised if you don’t have an account with the right network.

    So also with sub-cultures as opposed to geographic spread. “Everyone” may be using twitter, but personally I’ve yet to meet anyone outside of bloggers and other geeks that use it. I’m sure they exists, but not in my circles. Not a single one.

    Another factor is that you can divide people you connect with in two groups: The ones you will follow - in other words the people who you care enough about communicating with that you’ll take actions to be where they are - and the ones that are incidental - the ones you connect with because they happen to be where you are.

    This applies both online and in person. I’m not a very social person. There’s perhaps a couple of handfuls of people I’d go out of my way to “meet” whether online or offline. But there are hundreds more I like the company of or like talking to that I’d be happy to meet if they happened to be the same place as me.

    It’s the former people, and particularly the former people with a big following / big group of close firends / big group of business associates that make the network effect powerful. And that group of people can be surprisingly small in many subcultures. I doubt it’d take more than a couple of handfuls of A-list bloggers to get sick of Twitter before the crowd that’s currently driving a lot of their traffic would crumble, for example, because I very much doubt that Twitter has much sway with “normal people” yet.

    The underlying concept may survive and become a “utility”, but the concept is too easy to copy for Twitter itself to become truly dominant other than in specific locations or sub-cultures: People have proven time and time again that while the network effect is strong, networks can migrate extremely quickly. Look at how ICQ crumbled, for example. Or how a dozen social network have come and “gone” (many of them still hanging around, or even doing well, but failing in specific geographies or sub-cultures).

44. Igor The Troll
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 2:14 am

    Christian Anderson , you talking multi dimension here. Parallel Universes!

    One must be an Alien to follow that!

45. Sam
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 2:30 am

    As a self-confessed non-geek using Twitter, I didn’t feel that affected by it being “down” for a couple of days. No cold turkey here.

    However, I still did find this post through the Twitter echo’s so point taken about Twitter’s influence.

    By the way, Twitter echo: someone I follow commented on someone he followed who commented on someone who followed what Michael Arrington probably was following on Twitter. Hence, echo.

46. Igor The Troll
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 2:35 am

    Maybe the next United States President better start paying attention to Twitter. Like the song goes, “I heard it through the Grapevine!”

47. Nathan
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 2:46 am

    $9.99 per month, that’s the new subscription rate for Twitter. I hear it’s coming and all you addicts will pay up for it like crack.

48. Marco van de Kamp
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 2:51 am

    Sam is the future . you are a non-ceek using twitter, reading techcrunch and and posting a comment after reading 43 orther geeks comments. cool…

    Do you people remember the book Cluetrain Manifesto. They talked about twitter and they knew back in 1999 where the internet was going. Read the book, it is great, online version:
    http://www.cluetrain.com/book/

49. Mike D
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 2:59 am

    I think Scoble is way off the mark on this one. In his race to be #1 on Twitter he made the service unusable. He admitted this himself when he threw in the towel at following 20,000. His move to FreindFeed just means that he is getting a fresh start. The same thing is going to happen there. He’s going to blow himself up until he can’t take it anymore and move on to the next thing in 6 months. His exit from FriendFeed comes at a time when a whole set of people are just discovering it for the first time. Just listen to Steve Gillmor (Gillmor Gang) who has only really started using it in the past few months.

    I use both Twitter and Friendfeed and I use them in very different ways. I follow over 600 people on Twitter but only about 50 people on FriendFeed. Twitter is where I cast a wide net for my information flow and FriendFeed is where I get a more focused (and more varied) information flow from my top 50. Following over 600 people on FriendFeed would result in an unusable (for me) information flow because of all of the different sources that it pulls from. Both Twitter and FriendFeed can and will coexist.

50. Mike
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 3:04 am

    I do agree that only geeks use Twitter as of now, but the way I see it — Geeks are the hardest critics, and if they love something like this, it can easily be deployed to the masses. I agree with Michael here, Twitter is on a huge wave that is hard to stop, no matter how many cool features you throw at its way.

51. Abi
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 3:12 am

    So, just because Twitter has already owned reputation with very high members its flaw about downtime doesn’t matter anymore!

52. MeshFeeds
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 3:19 am

    Both are great apps, despite, yes, for different purposes…

53. Aidan Mann
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 3:37 am

    I thought Friendster died because the owners got slightly irritated about the proliferation of fakester profiles with mass fakester followings that was turning into online prankster theatre. Whereafter they started shutting down profiles and everyone left in droves.

    It seemed a very long time before an online social network replaced Friendster. Tribe has a limited demographic. Bebo is for kids. Myspace seems to be mostly about music. Until Facebook opened up to those outside of the Ivy League it did not seem there was a viable online network that one could use like a business card when meeting people in the real world.

    I found this article on my Friendfeed list. I blog sometimes about movies. I read about developments in the geek world and am due to this a relatively early adopter but in my offline life I don’t know anyone who is into these developments at the same level I am. I know someone who has never given up on irc which seems to have been picked up again by a younger age group at least that’s what I have heard noise about.

    On twitter I have had some pretty interesting conversations with people in a few different countries, cities (and languages) after accelerating my usage of it. Something I chose to do after reading a wiki article about Silicon Wadi which led me to Zohar Zispel, to Von, and a workshop video on blogs featuring Jeff Pulver, Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble.

    It was Jeff Pulver who actively promoted twitter both in the video and on his blog where he invites to link with him on twitter. I had previously attempted to use twitter exclusively as a method of maintaining contact with real world friends and family but have discarded that idea.

    Yes and on Friendfeed I have a much lower more specialised list.

    As far as the next president of the United States paying attention to twitter I find it hard to believe Igor Troll you are unaware that McCain, Obama and Clinton all have twitter profiles. As do politicos in the UK where I live.

54. elektroseyir
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 3:41 am

    twitter means spam todays.

55. Lars Teigen
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 3:52 am

    Twitter is a public conversation. FriendFeed is a public conversation around feeds.

56. DC Crowley
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 4:31 am

    mwah! Friendfeed is so young, that it has no scalability issues *yet*. I like it though that when twitter fails we can continue on friendfeed. Jaiku never worked like that!

57. Dean Whitney
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 4:44 am

    I’ve gotten business cards from CEO’s with Twitter handles on them.

58. Dave Winer
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 5:44 am

    Mike, it’s not as dire as it may seem, esp for people who use a desktop client, as you do. Here’s what they should do to make you safe from Twitter outages:

    Offer you the option to have your stream of outbound tweets to be saved as an RSS feed that can be read by FriendFeed and other RSS-based tools.

    Then, you can do what I did in FriendFeed, point it to the RSS feed, and turn off their connection to Twitter.

    In FriendFeed, everyone will still see your updates though a little more slowly. And when Twitter goes down, everyone who cares about your updates can switch over to FriendFeed, perhaps temporarily. That’s what Scoble is recommending.

    I think FriendFeed should deliberately try to appeal to Twitter users, by reorganizing their UI to be familiar to us, but so far they haven’t wanted to do that. However, at some point, some ambitious entrepreneur is going to want to compete with Twitter directly, and all they’ll have to do is latch onto our RSS feeds and voila, you don’t need Twitter to be up to have the same effect as Twitter.

    The only way this bootstrap can happen is if Twitter is down for an extended period while important stuff is going on. Well today is the Pennsylvania primary, a big deal in my world and many others, and the Web 2.0 expo is happening this week in SF. How will we manage without Twitter. So we need something now, and luckily we have it.

    I’d encourage the people who make the desktop tools to get on this right away. I’m going to post this on Scripting News. If developers want to discuss it there, I’ll be online through the day (and grasping for whatever returns are coming in from PA).

59. LiveCrunch
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 5:49 am

    Michael,

    Do you have your own personal twitter because each time I twitt you on @techcrunch do u use that one only for @techcrunch feedpost?

60. Dave Winer
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 5:51 am

    Here’s the post I promised.

    http://www.scripting.com/stori.....terNo.html

    Dave

61. Snipergirl
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 6:24 am

    personally this is what I think:

    just as how facebook hasn’t monopolised and killed friendster, orkut, hi5 and MSN hasn’t killed AIM, Yahoo, Jabber/Gtalk I do not believe that twitter is monopolising over jaiku, tumblr etc, nor do I think that friendfeed is monopolising over the other lifestreaming services. I believe that they will differentiate into their niches and various cliques will tend to use one service.

    What makes it all easier is of course using thigns like ping.fm to post to more than one service at once- I use both jaiku and twitter for example.

    Personally I prefer Jaiku to Twitter and Socialthing to Friendfeed.

    Also given how nascent these techs are it’s far too early to speculate on monopolisation or the future of the services - just look at the multiplicity of twitter clients! No single one appears to be winning even though one may appear to be leading the rest…

62. Chris Rossini
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 6:46 am

    I can’t disagree that Twitter has the network effect at it’s back.

    However, I don’t think Twitter should rest on its laurels as a result. Twitter’s “monopoly” does not bar any competitors from trying to take a swing. People are very fickle and can leave en masse just as fast as they came in.

    Granted..the competing product would have to be better than Twitter x10, but it is possible.

63. Internet Business Blogger
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 7:08 am

    I have been using Twitter only a little over the last year but last month i added you Michael as well as a few others and now i find that there are great conversation going on that anyone can join into.

    The real trouble with Twitter is that it is a time suck. I was much more productive when I was a lonely geek

64. Ferodynamics
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 7:10 am

    Twitter would really catch on if they made it a Myspace app.

65. Robert Scoble
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 7:14 am

    MikeD: Twitter is far from unusable for me. And, since when does MY behavior have anything to do with YOUR experience? If you are happy only following 50 people, more power to you! You are defined by who you follow, not by who follows you.

    As for FriendFeed, I’m already following 1,600 people and LOVE the flow.

66. Microserf
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 7:22 am

    There is no use for twitter or any web 2.0 social application at all.
    oops…I just burped - better go update my twitter, facebook, friend feed status to let the world know. Who Cares.

67. Mike Cane
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 7:36 am

    >>>But since everyone is already using Twitter

    Keep freakin dreaming there, pal.

68. paullmf
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 7:46 am

    i WANT them both..and that says everything i need to know.
    there’s no argument Twitter and FF are different. Can u watch videos in twitter windows? can u ‘like’ stuff and have stuff recommended to you by friends of ppl u follow in twitter? No…but just as Mike says, Twitter is a brilliant shortform broadcast msg system.

69. paullmf
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 7:51 am

    oh..and this crap about Twitter and Lifestream feeds being a time suck…to me they accelerate my learning speed. If its wasting YOUR time, then i suggest your following people for the wrong reasons.

70. Toby S.
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 8:15 am

    Outside Silicon Valley, Twitter is of limited use.

    However, as a reporter I can see it will be massively important when two things happen:

    1) Newsmakers start using it.
    2) There’s a better way to reduce the noise-to-signal ratio.

    The first is already true for the tech vortex _ newsmakers there are using it _ which is why it’s so useful for readers of Tech Crunch. Access to the firstlings of the hearts of the tech elite is becoming democratized.

    PS I’ve noticed a dramatic ramp up in use of Twitter over here in the Netherlands in the past month.

71. fred
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 8:19 am

    Other than people trying to hawk their company or personal brands, and egomaniacs that think people really want to hear their every tweet about their thoughts and what they are doing, what are the beneficial uses of twitter for consumers?

    Seems like just more of the “look at me” crap that many web 2.0 startups seem to cater to.

    So what say you Mike and others to provide good examples of where twitter actually provides good value to consumers that have a life?

72. Cal
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 8:41 am

    Michael, you should’ve cited @dacort and TweetStats for the image you used of your timeline. http://tweetstats.com/graphs/techcrunch

73. Uway
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 8:45 am

    twitter is owning the game in mobile social net work. all they need now is to have that user recognition when you are around a local twitter. The IM and Device Is what set it off..i can’t wait to get a real phone with real internet on it so i can never be home.

74. Tabz
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 8:47 am

    I probably won’t leave Twitter because of some outages. I mean, I’ve been with them over a year now - through all of the crazy problems (seeing the LOLCat fixing my server 10000082829283 times has not stopped me).

75. engtech
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 8:50 am

    I’ve written a program for importing your Twitter contacts into Friend Feed. The next version is going to also let you import your Friend Feed contacts back into Twitter.

    Redundancy is the only solution

    http://internetducttape.com/20.....riendfeed/

76. kevin gao
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 8:59 am

    michael - i think the friendster parallel would still apply, since friendster had strong network effects going for it as well, increasing rate of user growth, and a de facto monopoly. i would imagine twitterers would very quickly move on to an alternate service if the site were down for say, 2 days/week for the next month, and had severe load time issues every time you accessed the service

77. bhc3
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 9:23 am

    I think Michael’s post probably is closest to the mark of all the Twitter downtime stories I’ve read. It signals that demand for, and dependency on, the service is high. These are good things, even if users must endure service problems.

    Anyone remember when AOL went through this same issue in the late 1990s? Things turned out fine there. More thoughts on that: http://tinyurl.com/3wolqm

78. Evan
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 9:25 am

    I think that Fred asks a good question.

    The problem is that the vast majority people that seem to comment are trying to peddle their personal brands, so it might be tough to get good examples from this crowd.

    Worth trying though.

79. Erik
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 9:36 am

    Everyone is not using Twitter.

    Everyone within this small community uses Twitter.

    There’s a big difference.

80. Aidan Mann
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 9:38 am

    There are plenty of newsmakers on Twitter. A network cameraman for one who tweets about his life in that world from Washington DC.

    As well as mentioned in my earlier post Obama, Clinton and McCain they are newsmakers right? They make the news yeah? ;] They are on twitter.

    I myself subscribe to AFP Liban in French, Al Jazeera English, YNET in Hebrew and Israel news in English as well as a couple more small news services on twitter. I know there are others who have BBC, SKY and FOX amongst others on their list. I choose not to follow those in tweet world.

    Outside of Silicon Valley in Birmingham UK I have daily conversations with Israel and Denmark on Twitter and as a language and politics student I am getting high volume small dosages of languages as they are actually used rather than taught in school from Chile, Morocco, Mexico, Marseille, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Tehran. I also have a Dutch media type songwriter in New Zealand tweeting me.

    If you think twitter is of no use outside silicon valley try picking up tweets in Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and Persian script and tell me what you then think is going on. I get those every five - ten minutes.

    I am getting this article through Friend feed.

    Whoever said that the person who thinks they are wasting time on Twitter is following the wrong people and that they themselves see twitter as a chance for an accelerated learning feed. Well I totally agree with that perspective. This is how I understand twitter in its current phase of evolution.

    I didn’t hear from the BBC that Vietnam launched a satellite today. I heard it on twitter and have techy studenty vietnamese people tweeting at me already. And I mean how cool is that? I think it’s pretty cool.

    And all outside of silicon valley which I have no doubt is a wonderful place. Especially if you have friends there.

81. Kimbo
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 9:44 am

    Hey Good news!

    All this twitter down time is warming all of you goofs up for when Twitter runs out of money and goes down FOR EVER!

    haha!

82. AntiTroll
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 9:45 am

    So what Michael is saying is that once you are hooked on Twitter, its like you are hooked on crack. Anyone for Twitter Anonymous group meetings here? some detox perhaps?

83. Ryan
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 9:48 am

    @78, very true. The tech blogging universe needs to maintain perspective, and remember that what they do is not mainstream. Arrington might as well be a plumber talking about his new specialty wrench.

84. Mark Evans
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 10:30 am

    In an ideal world, it would be good to see Pownce emerge as a strong alternative to Twitter. You can easily argue Pownce is better than Twitter but without a critical mass of users, it’s not very useful.

85. drew olanoff
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 11:42 am

    Would FriendFeed be getting this much attention of the founders weren’t former Google folks?

86. Web 2.0 Parties
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm

    For all those going to Web Expo in SF.
    http://twitter.com/partyzone

87. AW
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 12:16 pm

    @84: Pownce seems more like a platform for short blog posts, as opposed to extremely small messages like Twitter.

88. Jason Bogovich
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 12:23 pm

    Absolutely correct Mike. The twittersphere is about communications. Microblogging is a horrible way to describe Twitter. People log information on weblogs. In Twitter, people converse about information and where to find it. It’s the discussion layer. When I use Twinkle on my iPhone, I know a new era in computing is on its way. Geo Relevancy. The world could evolve into a digital geo-bazaar; buyers and sellers working directly together, it could hurt advertising all together and make it extinct for all but brand distinction. Think about saying, I want to buy a camera, then 50 people who sell cameras all contact you and have to compete for your business. Payer per physical visit might be irrelvant, the first person to capture Twitter + GPS + Craigslist is going to make some money.

89. Travell Perkins
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 12:48 pm

    I’m with Mike on this one. Twitter would be nothing without its API and the ecosystem around it. My life changed once I installed Twhirl.

90. AnonTroll
    

    April 22nd, 2008 at 3:10 pm

    How does Twitter make money?

91. Darren
    

    April 23rd, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    Remember when ICQ was the king of chat and no-one thought it would ever be topped because it had such a huge head-start? I’d say it’s user base then was many times larger than Twitter is now.

92. Nikpay
    

    April 23rd, 2008 at 6:38 pm

    I think with such a strong comment from Mr. Arrington, bloggers are going to become bullish about promoting their Twitter Accounts as well. I am going to be one of the first to debute this: twitter.com/nikpay

93. efimor
    

    May 7th, 2008 at 8:10 pm

    […] Extra twitter reading […] About Twitter’s sucess […]