Twitter May Not Have To Care About Uptime Any Longer

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.

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?

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…

Mike, Twitter Owns you.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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’.

Charlie, why not start your own social network.

Jackie - pull your mind out of the gutter.

your comment reminds me of this post:

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

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

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.

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

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….

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…

@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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

@Igor

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

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.

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.

@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”

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

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…

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.

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).

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

One must be an Alien to follow that!

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.

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

$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.

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/

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.

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.