Michael once wrote that Twitter may not have to worry about uptime any more, explaining, “I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.” And, a few months and countless hours of downtime later, it looks like most of you feel the same way. The early adopters may have migrated to Friendfeed, but the masses appear to be content to stay and take their punishment at Twitter.
Hitwise has just released their latest Twitter usage data, and despite a reliability record that many would describe as an “epic fail”, the service is showing a surprising amount of resilience. Twitter’s share of returning visitors (users that return to the site more than once in thirty days) has held steady at around 55% since March. Twitter has seen near-constant downtime and disappearing features in that time, but nobody seems to mind. At least, not enough to try out one of the other microblogging services.
The site has also seen impressive growth, rising from around .0004% of all internet traffic in January to .0024% in July – the nearest competitor only sees about 1/10th of that traffic. These numbers also neglect to account for the many Twitter users who use the site through its API using 3rd party programs, so we can expect Twitter’s lead to be even more significant.
In effect, we’ve been telling Twitter that no matter how badly it screws up, we’ll stay loyal, simply because our friends are already on the service.
So the truth about friendfeed finally comes out: only a few big-big time bloggers care about it.
please change title to:
Apparently You People Don’t Really Care About Twitter.
Period.
When’s the techcrunch survey about how many readers care about twitter?
I’ve been Twitter Roll’d.
Stop this nonsense…
Apparently I couldn’t care less about Twitter AT ALL – a proud non-member of this waste of time!
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
twitter is a stupid idea that will never break in the mass market.
Why aren’t people leaving Twitter? Because, even with its problems, there isn’t a solid competitor that’s worth leaving it for.
Yet.
This graph jives with my data more than with Mike’s observation that he’s got half the FriendFeeds in a fraction of the Twitter time. Unlike FF, I think Twitter has hit the list for a lot more more mainstream and marketing people and will grow until it has high levels of tech penetration, then level off quickly.
You mean Arrington, Calacanis, and Scoble don’t represent the average user? Do tell.
and yet you guys seem to be totally obsessed with it… we know you love pushing friendfeed… and twitter sucks – we get it. move on….
I really thought this a post where Techcrunch would finally stop making daily posts about Twitter.
At least tell Steve Gilmour that Twitter is not a business app. It’s on TechcrunchIT about every other day.
could all this press they’re getting about their downtime is driving traffic? Any news is good news, right…
I think the real message of the story is that your bully pulpit isn’t nearly as influential as you (and your advertisers) wish it was. Too bad you haven’t yet been able to break Twitter or make FriendFeed.
Any news is good news, and also, i gotta say, twitter has lowered the bar for developers everywhere. thank you!
Once again, it’s the perfect simplicity of Twitter that keeps us using. FriendFeed is coming on strong but it isn’t an either or thing, it’s both. FriendFeed is experiencing rapid growth but still has a long way to go to match the numbers and api’s plugging it towards dominance. Every time I get a little bored with Twitter a new app comes out and adds some geewhiz to the experience – tweetdeck?
My 2c: If with all your promoting and praising, friendfeed can’t take twitter, I suggest you stop. Because it’s getting annoying.
I enjoy and use twitter a lot, but I don’t care about the downtime, I see the fail whale i come back later, why? Because I’m not running a business on it, it’s mostly a distraction (a fascinating distraction maybe, but a distraction all the same), and it’s not really very time sensitive, in the fact that I miss lots of tweets when i’m not watching it anyway.
You can read more at my Chris Cocker inspired post “leave twitter alone” http://experien...e-twitter-alone
Peace out, and see you on twitter http://twitter.com/karllong
Could I request more traffic reports from Google Trends instead of Hitwise? http://tinyurl.com/65xgng
Yeah, I don’t care about its downtime, because I never go there…… what’s the point?
thanks for the break {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/YyA0HUAmon_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”thanks for the break ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/kvg9uV3HAy”}}}
I care about Twitter downtime because like many people, I run a web service that relies on its API (among many others) … and the API seems to be the first thing Twitter yanks when it has server load issues.
So yes! I care! Combo cares! There!
twitter = deadpool 2009
Any thoughts on how twitter can break into the mainstream? Perhaps celebrity twitters?
“Near constant” is a bit of a biased exaggeration.
And by “bit” I mean “really freaking big”.
When I think “near constant” I think somewhere in the ball park of 90% and if you are trying to say that it’s down 90% of the time, well, it’s reaching and makes your post seem… what’s the word I’m looking for? Bitter?
And just to repeat other comments: WE GET IT. You don’t like twitter, you like FriendFeed. Can we expect another similar post tomorrow or do you realize that WE GET IT.
twitter news jumped the shark about 5 nautical miles ago
This is so true, I have tried other services but my friends are not there so I stay put on downtime Twitter.
I personally don’t care if Twitter is up or down, it is so much noise that it is really of little solid value. I use check it out once in a while, once a day maybe, and if it’s up great, otherwise I spend a bit of time reading blogs.
If Twitter dies tomorrow I will have a bit more time to read blogs. FriendFeed is OK but doesn’t have a huge draw for me right now. The rooms are cool but that is about it.
Twitter is just plain cool. The down time sucks but at least they have been open and honest about it, so it is easy to be loyal while they are trying to fix their mistakes.
How many companies actually are honest about their flaws? Most tend to be like Yahoo who try to candy coat things under this illogical assumption that people would rather hear a nice lie than an ugly truth.
I think people are tired of being manipulated, tired of being lied to and so even though they are annoyed with the downtime, they are willing to stay loyal through it.
@Raskin ahh, yes good point, if I had a service relying on the API then I guess it would be more business critical, hopefully your service has a big BETA icon on it somewhere. It raises an interesting question, if you are running a beta service, at what point do you open up the api’s to developers. Also, 80% of twitters traffic goes over it’s api’s so should twitter have limited people who can access the api until they have solved their scaling problem, maybe “invite only” api’s, or would that have stunted it’s growth and potential success?
I log into Twitter sporadically during the day. So if it goes down — and I haven’t noticed it that much cause I was busy when it was mostly happened — it isn’t significant. For those that are on all the time — it looks significant. But I think most people come in sporadically to check in.
yep…we don’t care…stop writing about it please….no more
It’s not about features on competing platforms. It’s not about Twitter downtime. It’s about high switching costs.
If FriendFeed comes out with an app that automatically subscribes you to all the folks you’re following on Twitter, that might change things.
I’m willing to give friendfeed a chance but NOBODY IS USING IT. I’m a software developer, and I scanned all of my contacts and only ONE person had a friendfeed account: his feed consisted solely of twitter updates. Just because early adopters try everything doesn’t mean that anyone else will. If you are like me and you have 8-10 friendfeed-accessible services you use, you’re in the vast minority.
Twitter is catching on with the mainstream (witness the jump in traffic), and once they get some more engineers and processors in there the performance won’t be an issue. It’s frustrating, to be sure, but to be honest I don’t really notice the difference between 20 API calls an hour and 70 API calls an hour.
The thing about Twitter is it came first. Plurk has a stupid name/looks stupid the way it represents your Plurks.
Pownce is similar to Twitter yet doesn’t have the same community.
Jaiku was bought by Google and now feels complete abandoned.
Twitter is great and I hope in the future they will fix the problems about Downtime as for Friendfeed, I have one but don’t use it. The purpose of it is somewhat different than the people use it for. Just like Twitter.
twitter is low maintence from the average user.. it takes little of your attention. I tried friendfeed and with the same number of users was bombbarded with great long converstation repeating them selfs all the time. I dont want to enter some great converstaion and spend hours reading rober scobles replies and comments form his users.
twitter is much less intrusive. I was very disapointed with FF. the two things are polls apart in there usage
As lame as Twitter is, all its competitors are worse.
It’s the eBay effect. Remember Yahoo! and Amazon auctions? People go where the people are.
Gee, I wonder where all of this user interest is coming from in the midst of all the downtime? Posts like this perhaps?
Downtime doesn’t matter to Twitter because it’s a trivial service. “Oh well. If I can’t tweet about my egg breakfast now, I’ll just tweet about my hamburger lunch later.”
And the value of Twitter is hardly the service itself – the service offering is weak and outdated; plenty of better options out there. The value is the popularity. No competitor has such a large community and so Twitter will continue to appeal to people.
Can we please stop discussions on Twitter downtime? I doubt anyone cares.
yo techcrunch!
What do you have it against twitter.
usually i think your posts are good. but your rants about twitter and your desire to expose how bad it is, isnt helping techcrunch.
honestly, think about how failure prone most software is.
Techcrunch sounds like a disgruntled teenager grafitting over your sisters boyfriends tag. Cmon! Shut up
I never care about its downtime.. and twitter is generally down, so i see if its working fine.. i update or else just leave it!
I still can’t figure how an average mass net user would like to use Twitter. Twitter is useful for those who spend a long and continuous time on the net or those who can afford to send messages from mobile regularly(remember they cost !). It is relevant for the techies who need to keep themselves updated by the minute ..I may not be aware of its other advantages, and it would be great if somebody could let me know how Twitter can be useful for a non-IT business executive,school children,college students,homemakers etc. How can these people use Twitter kind of services to get more into their lives?
Apparently TechCrunch doesn’t really care about Plurk. The numbers speak for Plurk, yet you continue to write about FriendFeed. Open your eyes to the evidence in the graph you posted.
http://0at.org/...ummer-2008.html
Uh, if you consider about 8 hours a week “near constant,” I sincerely doubt your ability to calculate relative amounts of time.
Speaking for myself I can say if twitter doesn’t get the downtimes and restrictions handled I really might be thinking about switsching to identi.ca.
its simple twitter friendfeed, or plurk are not the network, we are the network. A listers are meaningless they are not the network. The network goes where my community is, the application is meaningless. If they move then network moves.
Twitter is not invincible, It just has some advantages, like USER BASE! We need twitter! Take a look here.
http://williamk...ter-invincible/
There are hundreds of noteworthy events occuring in this industry every day. Why, oh why, do you keep reverting back to the same twitter buzz-o-thon? If you guys blog about twitter one more time in the next few weeks I am going on a permananent techcrunch vacation. Who is with me?
Nice last graph there, friendfeed huh? lol
It’s the people. Twitter allowed us to create our own communities, we can’t find the same communities, the same complete group of people anywhere else…..until we get fed up and leave Twitter.
You people? Oh no you didn’t!
Are you guys investors in Friendfeed or something? Friendfeed’s another of those sites that I don’t think anybody would take seriously if it wasn’t mentioned twice a day in Techcrunch.
There IS a way to beat Twitter, but none of you Twits will try it… Make a site that targets the 99.9% of the population that lives outside Silicon Valley. Find a way to market to people like that… Then the rest of the world will care.