A key feature of Twitter has been down most of this week: Replies. The core Twitter service itself is alive, but the team took the Reply feature down on Tuesday when the service started to slow. As of now, Friday afternoon, Replies are still down.
Disabling certain features is Twitter’s recent attempt to keep their frail architecture from failing completely. They tried it out during Apple’s recent WWDC keynote and it worked, so they’re clearly using this approach more often now to deal with problems.
But here’s the problem - Replies was the wrong feature to turn off (whether there was a choice in the matter or not). The beautiful thing about Twitter is that spontaneous, diverse conversations erupt that are almost synchronous, or chat like (see our post about Quotably, which pulls these conversations out and highlights them). Conversations are what makes Twitter magic.
But that magic is created by the simple Reply feature - when you add “@TechCrunch” to a Twitter message, it tells me you are saying something directly to me, to start a new conversation or reply to an existing one. Without Reply, Twitter turns into a one way telephone conversation. Pulling the feature out is equivalent to a frontal lobotomy - Twitter is still walking around, but there’s a blank stare in its eyes.
So why aren’t people screaming about the feature being gone? Because this time, they’re just heading over to Friendfeed to have those very same conversations. Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.
This message, for example, is one that I would have written to Twitter if the Reply feature was working. Instead I posted it to Friendfeed, and the conversation picked up without a hitch.
If I was Twitter I’d be very worried about Friendfeed. Their young competitor seems to have zero stability problems, and is quietly in the process of pulling away all the special parts of Twitter.
Twitter was mentioned on yesterday’s Daily Show (at about the 10:00 mark). Let’s all hope that when we look back, that mention by Jon Stewart didn’t mark Twitter’s peak, just as Friendfeed ascended.
FriendFeed is better for conversation anyway. No 140-char limit. And your comments aren’t broadcast to all 10,000 people who follow you (creating an incredible cacaphony of WTF’s from people who have no idea what you’re talking about). FF is a better tool for this. These days, it’s hard to think of what Twitter is better at, much less good for. Sorry, but it’s true.
While not the most convenient, Summize.com works as a substitute for replies. It’s one feature that can be replicated. Even though twitter sucks, it’s tough to leave.
nice picture!
@1: outside silicon valley, nobody gives a shit about either.
Twitter’s downtime drove me to FriendFeed.
Friendfeed’s stability and usability kept me there.
Twitter - your scaling problems are beyond ridiculous at this point. I don’t know why I even bother anymore.
You’re right, Twitter is wasting an incredible opportunity and risks fading into obscurity if users jump the bandwagon. It wouldn’t be the first time that the first to market was eventually killed by the better prepared fast follower.
Summize is my friend in this situation Mike, I totally agree that without replies twitter is difficult to follow but summize sorts that out for me.
The real worry for me in my position as founder of twitterfone is the lack of stability of the twitter API this week which also renders Twhirl surplus to requirements.
Surely it would make sense for twitter to buy summize or to develop a summize type app for just these situations.
I am definitely seeing a movement towards friendfeed but I remain a huge twitter fan, warts and all
Joe - yeah, and nobody cared about youtube outside of the valley until 2006.
Arrington please don’t compare Youtubes service to that of Twitter. Give me a break. YouTube fulfilled a much needed service. Twitter fulfills absolutely nothing.
@8, in 2005 when I made my original social networking software, I noticed a large number of people using youtube on myspace. this was as early as August 2005.
These were not silicon valley people.
Both photobucket and youtube rode on the coat tails of myspace users. As did many other cut&paste html businesses.
“If I was Twitter I’d…” = “If I were Twitter I’d…”
subjunctives, Michael!
http://web.archive.org/web/200.....utube.com/
That should make some people smile. That’s all Hurley and Chen had before the VC stepped in! I remember it well.
I may be in the minority, but I won’t switch from twitter to friendfeed til friendfeed hires a designer… They really need to polish the look and feel a bit, and get rid of that damn ugly logo… it may go down as the worst logo ever.
http://web.archive.org/web/200...../index.php
That should make some people smile. That is all Hurley and Chen had before the VC stepped in. I remember it well.
Again, VCs invest in people. Not nice interfaces or cool pitches.
@Michael
You nailed it this time (actually twice).
1) I’ve used the reply function a lot to have conversations and stay in touch with people. Since it’s off I’ve almost stopped using twitter. I just haven’t had time to seriously move somewhere else. Replies are an essential part of the twitter phenomenon and if it doesn’t go back up asap people will run. For me twitter rendered itself useless by blocking replies. Yes I can go over to summize and do a to:[myname] query but then I also don’t want to order a towing truck service every time I want to start up my car.
2) All the ‘people don’t care about [put whatever service here] outside the valley’ talk is nonsense. People first didn’t care about any of the big success that came out of there at first. I am by far not a valley preacher but one has to acknowledge that a lot of cool things that got early adoption in that region broke mainstream and changed our lives. If twitter will or not doesn’t mater because TC is all about reporting about those who have the potential (not guarantees ) to do that in the future.
This sucks to watch. I love Twitter, and have coped with the downtime, but no Replies has really been lame. I feel like it’s less than 1/2 of what it should be, and agree that replies is not what should have been turned off.
I’m headed over to FF to check it out… finally. Kicking and screaming. I’m still on Twitter… but you know…
And, agreed with #3, amazing picture
Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
completely unrelated but total awesomeness.
Twitter is no youtube. Still, at this point some folks are finding they enjoy using friendfeed and frankly, that’s all she wrote. I came to this link via friendfeed. In the end, thats all that should matter to techcrunch. Who cares if I send you @’s on twitter. We don’t know one another. For me, it has very little to do with their scalabiity issue. I hate to agree with Dave but he’s right. ‘FFis a better tool’ - its just not a night club for Cougars…
all you guys with the 20/20 hindsight should really become VCs and spend less time leaving comments on blogs.
@16 Michael
I’ll make sure our customer service won’t have any games installed. Or should wh give clients a choice if they want their problem solved or play a round of Halo with us?
Awesome! Makes my day.
Oh uuups… our website id down… better call our provider…
I find the @ disable on Twitter annoying, but like Pat, I find Summize a nice, simple workaround. I, like most users, do not have so many replies or conversations that Summize cannot EASILY keep track of them. I don’t think that an early adopter like @Scoblizer is a model user in this case.
I also agree with Kyle that one major problem I see with FriendFeed is the interface. I hate it. Twitter doesn’t have a great web interface either, but it’s better than FF, and tools like Twhirl and TwitterBerry make up for that, too. (I don’t really like FF on Twhirl, though it’s better than the web.)
I will stick with Twitter for now, because even though about half of my tweets are @ replies, I don’t really use it for _conversation_ per se - more like spontaneous short IM chats that end in <3 tweets and involve 2-3 people. Don’t need an entirely different website to “manage” that.
FF may eventually be better, but not yet. The lack of scalability of Twitter is disappointing, though, like a promising political campaign that just can’t get national momentum, loses donations, and has to fold.
Jeremy: I think that you are very wrong. Having been fixated at how news flow over twitter over the last 14 days, I can tell you that twitter has a broad international reach, with a lot of different profile. If you do not believe me take you favorite subject and try to do a search on summize and see how deep the result set is.
To Dave’s point, friendfeed is a little more organized but I think that I personally like the pinch of serendipity that twitter brings to the mix.
As mike pointed out, what twitter really needs is stability + summize + quotably. They have the opportunity to create the tools that everyone will use to capture word of mouth, which is both fun for users and killer for companies who need to understand how people are reacting to their products and services.
twitter: please go hire 5 top notch database/memcached/messaging gurus and kill the stability problem once for all.
@8: wrong. people outside the valley cared about youtube because they used youtube. twitter’s usage is confined mostly to silicon valley.
Maybe it’s the name, or it’s simplicity, but even with replies off for a while now I’m still using it and *shock, horror* find it a semi-useful tool.
Anyone local to me I follow, especially ones with similar interests, so I can keep up to date with what’s going on, getting the lowdown on plenty of stuff ahead of most news sources, in digestible chunks, with it being only the type of news I wish to be fed.
Also, the odd, amusing twitter convo between several people has taken place and even ‘tweetups’ with the local people I follow.
People keep slating Twitter for it’s lack of purpose but saying twitter isn’t much use is like saying blogging wasn’t ‘back in the day’. Does blogging all of a sudden serve a purpose now? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s still done by what seems to be a good portion of everyone who uses the Internet.
The difficulty with Twitter is that it’s concept is so vague that not many can pin-point a purpose to it. It’s all about finding a use from it.
My main use is getting fed only the tweets I’m interested in, that contain snippets of useful news happening, on and offline, by generally people who are local, so if another bomb goes off in the city centre, I know when to run!
I’d like FriendFeed a lot more if I could block people. Certain spammy types are constantly polluting the conversation with their every fleeting notion. On twitter one can just choose not to follow them to keep the noise down. The way FF considerately shows friend-of-a-friend posts makes it impossible to get away from these people on their service.
@ Joe Bowers
I am from Germany, living and working in Canada, twittering with people in Portugal, Spain, Germany, Canada, UK, USA and…. the valley.
Strange, I live in the south west of the UK. Does that count as being near SV?
@4: Inside Silicon Valley no one gives a shit about you.
@22: I think you’re completely wrong about twitter users only being silicon valley types. im from the bay area and work in the philippines half the year and you wouldn’t believe the adoption of twitter here in the philippines. now imagine how huge twitter would be here if twitter had a shortcode in the philippines w/ the philippines is the texting capital by volume in the world.
@27: Oy I shouldn’t have said that.
“@8: wrong. people outside the valley cared about youtube because they used youtube. twitter’s usage is confined mostly to silicon valley.”
http://politicalticker.blogs.c.....a-twitter/
They have friends. Mike being one of them. They’re hoping that with all their friend power, they can push it through, whether the population accepts it or not.
“all you guys with the 20/20 hindsight should really become VCs and spend less time leaving comments on blogs.”
I’m sure most of us would if we could. My VC powers tell me that Android is going to go through the roof.
phandroid.com/2008/02/26/android-sdk-downloads-hit-750000/
I am going to continue developing for it after I start selling my script.
@27: i don’t know who you are so let’s call it even.
@JoeBowers You’re wrong. I live tucked away in the mountains of NC (Asheville) and there is a HUGE twitter usage here. We’ve already had a successful packed out Tweetup and the numbers grow everyday. In fact the whole southeast is full of twitterers.
dm
There are arse kissers, then there’s Urban, Peter Urban.
Its time to dump twitter….. Twitter goes to deadpool
That video was hilarious :0
NewsJunk: It’s like getting kicked in the junk by Dave Winer.
@33, Conversely I live in Southern California, and nobody I know here uses Twitter. People do text a lot here, but not with twitter.
The reason “no one” is outraged is that the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit.
@7 “joe - yeah, and nobody cared about youtube outside of the valley until 2006.”
For supposedly being a lawyer I would think basic debate logic and principles would be second nature to you. This statement has no relevance whatsoever to the topic of Twitter. 1) We aren’t talking about YouTube. 2)YouTube and Twitter are completely different products.
Make you case about the popularity of Twitter amongst normal people.
I don’t understand why anyone cares. Will a puppet please explain things?
39: It doesn’t matter. Once July 1 comes around it will be illegal to send text messages and/or Twitter updates while driving a car in California and Twit’s usage will plummet.
I think you’re completely wrong about twitter users only being silicon valley types. im from the bay area and work in the philippines half the year and you wouldn’t believe the adoption of twitter here in the philippines. now imagine how huge twitter would be here if twitter had a shortcode in the philippines w/ the philippines is the texting capital by volume in the world.
Anecdotal examples are not proof points. Let’s make it easy: what’s the percentage of people in, oh, I dunno, Iowa, that use Twitter vs, IM, text messaging, and even email? If it’s >5% I’d be shocked.
Whats with all this fawning over Friendfeed?
LMAO @ Mike’s unrelated video. I saw that couple of days ago, couldn’t stop laughing all through the video, don’t stop till you get to the part when the web dude remote desktop into the sales guy’s computer.
we’ll be back there is hope…
My video comment is in moderation ;-(
@41: America owns the market for narcissism. If Twitter can ride the wave of web 2.0 self love here than I doubt they can do it the world over.
@16 Michael
The definition of success is when you can post the video “yo webdude, our website is down” on the main page of your company website.
@Peter Urban
I’ve got your back.
@ Thanks Jason