We used to speculate that Twitter’s persistent downtime and overall poor service quality could result in a Friendster-type nose dive. But after a three day weekend outage I realized that in the last two months a subtle shift occured: I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.
So while Robert Scoble speculates that FriendFeed is the big winner when Twitter goes down, and Dave Winer hacks together contingency plans for the next outage that remind me of stockpiling candles and bottled water for the next big storm, I just shake my head at how wonderfully we’ve all been had.
Without any government intervention at all Twitter has created a de-facto monopoly in the micor-blogging space. We all know from experience that it doesn’t make sense for cable companies, with regional monopolies, to put many resources towards upgrading the network and performing actual customer service (therefore, outages, downtime and no one on the phones). But Twitter may have something better than a physical monopoly – the network effect.
There are many competitors out there, and some of them are better than Twitter. But since everyone is already using Twitter, and the rate of growth is increasing, going to those competitors makes no sense.
For me Twitter became indispensable in March 2008, when my usage skyrocketed (I started using a desktop client to read and write messages) – see image above. It is now an important part of my work and social life, as I carry on bite-sized conversations with thousands of people around the world throughout the day. It’s a huge marketing tool, and information tool. But it is also a social habit that’s hard to kick.
For others the Twitter habit started long ago. And for most people, it is yet to start. But the trend is clear: Twitter is becoming an Internet utility. And their monopoly power via the network effect they’ve earned means they don’t have to worry much about downtime. We’ll all still be sitting here patiently, waiting for it to return.
Some will argue, as does Robert Scoble, that Twitter’s open API allows other services to suck off their users and eventually supplant them if the service outages continue. But as more services use the Twitter API, the value of the core message transmission engine behind the service increases. All Twitter has to be is the pipes to win. And, since they clearly are the pipes, they’ve already won.
I’ve Twittered this post to my followers. But since they’re having an outage affecting popular users, no one can see it. Ah well.
So, just because Twitter has already owned reputation with very high members its flaw about downtime doesn’t matter anymore!
Both are great apps, despite, yes, for different purposes…
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.
twitter means spam todays.
Twitter is a public conversation. FriendFeed is a public conversation around feeds.
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!
I’ve gotten business cards from CEO’s with Twitter handles on them.
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).
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?
Here’s the post I promised.
http://www.scri...mTwitterNo.html
Dave
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…
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.
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
Twitter would really catch on if they made it a Myspace app.
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.
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.
>>>But since everyone is already using Twitter
Keep freakin dreaming there, pal.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Michael, you should’ve cited @dacort and TweetStats for the image you used of your timeline. http://tweetsta...aphs/techcrunch
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.
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).
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://internet...-to-friendfeed/
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
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
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.
Everyone is not using Twitter.
Everyone within this small community uses Twitter.
There’s a big difference.
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.
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!
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?
@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.
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.
Would FriendFeed be getting this much attention of the founders weren’t former Google folks?
For all those going to Web Expo in SF.
http://twitter.com/partyzone
@84: Pownce seems more like a platform for short blog posts, as opposed to extremely small messages like Twitter.
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.
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.
How does Twitter make money?
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.
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
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Looked at twitter some months ago, and did not see the value at that time. Recently took another look at it, started using it. Now I have found some bloggers that relate to my topic ‘Web 2.0 and Management’; some real interesting conversations have followed!
nice