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.
When Twitter is down, we just wait til it comes back up. Status updates are great to have, but not essential items. IE: It’s annoying, but we understand the growing pains. Twitter has enough critical mass to become a verb, and it’s probably over the hump of acceptance to groups who are influenced by early adopters. It only has to make it to the next stage of mainstream acceptance and none of the other services will matter. I think they have enough momentum and name recognition to do it. People just want one good thing, not dozens.
Why would I bother with FriendFeed when everyone is on Twitter?
I think that Twitter will give way to another service. It’s very hard for the first company to be the best one - they stick to what worked for them in the beginning and new, more flexible ones start eating their candy.
Here’s a shock: no one cares about Twitter’s uptime except technorati like Arrington, Scoble and the rest of the people with 10,000+ followers.
Yeah.. I must agree with most people here,..noone cares about Twitter .. period.
For a website that “no one cares about”, Twitter articles sure get a lot of comments and traffic on TechCrunch.
So, maybe TC keeps putting their daily Twitter vs. FriendFeed article up because - SHOCKING - it brings in money for them.
Personally, I think the worst thing in the world is a long, drawn-out comment stream of “i don’t care about twitter, this article’s dumb, other people are dumb for caring about something i dont” BS. I don’t use a Mac - should I go on every Apple article on TC and post “macs are dumb, no one uses them for business, mac people are just fanboys”?
Saying “I don’t care about this article” in the article comments is such a waste of time and space. You obviously read the article, and cared enough to comment. That’s traffic, baby. That’s exactly what TC wants.
early adopters migrated to FriendFeed? No, everyone on Twitter is an early adopter. For most people it’s just too much noise. For people who make their money in the blogosphere it’s a great tool, for everyone else it’s just too much information.
The same thing has been true of MySpace. For much of its existence, performance has been horrible, and its been rife with error messages, and yet, it kept growing.
Add me to the list of people who’s life goes on while Twitter is down. Or FriendFeed.
And in case you’re wondering why I would spend time saying so, it is because I find the media’s fascination with both to be navel-gazing, and it is fun to call them on it
I’ve seen a lot of non-techies giving Twitter a try in the last month or so, but very very few of them do more than two or three posts. However, I also got my first spam follow last night, and if Twitter can’t add in new features, they’re going to have a hard time stopping spam.
I think FriendFeed is a better product, but it’s harder for non-techies to figure out.
Duh. The alternatives suck, and the downtime is a non-issue to everyone but the tech snobs.