Twitter Is Killing Itself, Slowly but Surely

May 21, 2008

OK, Twitter. It is time to get your act together. FriendFeed is abuzz with talk of Twitter outages. Bloggers are even staging Twit-Out, where they will, for a day, boycott Twitter and use FriendFeed exclusively. Bwana may have started the idea, but it spread quickly because bloggers talk and bloggers dig Twitter.

Twit-Out is today (May 21st), BTW, which is why I won’t be Twittering anything today. I might as well help the cause, you know.

Twitter acknowledged publicly the most recent outage (yesterday). And the comic is classic. But, this type of public acknowledgment is rare. Usually, all we get is silence while Twitter dies repeatedly.

Twitter, though, is killing itself. The outages are occurring so often that it gives rise to sites with the only purpose being to show if Twitter is down or not. IsTwitterDown is my personal favorite. Twitter is a communication medium and one that is particularly attractive to bloggers. Bloggers talk and talk loud and spread news like crazy. So, the nature of Twitter’s audience means every outage is like playing with fire. Every outage makes waves across the net in mere seconds. After awhile, it builds into a reputation. And that reputation isn’t getting any better.

Twit-Out is just more evidence of this.

Perhaps some additional funding will fix this problem. But, they need a business plan desperately. And they need to go back to basics on their infrastructure. Twitter obviously didn’t predict the rapid growth and rabid following. They got caught with their pants down and if they don’t get with the program, sites like FriendFeed are going to take over where Twitter failed.

People ditch Windows and go to OS X because of crashes and annoyances. Windows is still the big dog in the field, but frustration is growing and it is leading to leakage to other platforms. Many who use Windows today do so because they have to. Is Twitter mirroring Microsoft in this regard? Is FriendFeed the Apple of micro-blogging?

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