Why Twitter Still Wins

Great post Chris, I agree with you 100%. Well 98% ... I think the other big part of the equation is the community aspect: people don't want to leave Twitter because they can't pick up and take their network along with them to Jaiku, or wherever else. But I digress.

The App infrastructure that has sprung up around Twitter is indeed very helpful. I wrote a piece last week called The Top 10 Features Twitter Should Have, But Doesn't, and it has generated a lot of intersting discussion about Twitter's shortcomings, but one thing that has come to light is that almost all of the things we want Twitter to do natively... it -can- do through such and such third-party app.

That's the strength of the service hands down: When you cease to be a web app and start to become a web eco-system, you win.

Daniel Smith
Smithereens Blog

great points. the word "ecosystem" describes it perfectly.

APIs are definitely key. If there's a definition of the new web 2.0, I would say that it isn't just having user generated content, but really allowing connection with other sites and allowing things to be done with your data. If you're missing this then you're missing the boat. Even Salesforce has taken off I feel largely due to this.

Sadly, I think @skalik was also hit by the bug, as her account seems non-existent.

Thank you again for your support Chris!

good points chris. for me, I only use Summize and tweetstats infrequently and mostly for fun. What keeps me around is the community. I'm just not prepared to jump to another platform until I can take my network with me. Plurk, Indenti.ca whatever. They could all be (and probably are) better technically. But without my network, they are just hollow tools and I'm not ready to rebuild a network elsewhere...

I think it's more than that. The tools are good, but the tools wouldn't exist without the community. Even if the tools suddenly all vanished, I'd still stick with Twitter just because that's where I can find all the people I know online.

Sure, after a bit, the entire group would likely move to somewhere that did have those tools, but only after a lot of discussion.

*wonders if anyone reads the comments above before posting*

lol, ah well, great minds?

Hi Chris,
I think your post and assumption is accurate -- today. Google has how many billions of searches performed monthly? All it will take is iGoogle/Gmail integration and they'll surpass Twitter's usage within minutes. Ok, maybe a few days. But much like how Friendfeed and Facebook are allowing users to comment on statuses, Twitter is actually really behind the times. The usability sucks, the Fail Whale still rears his ugly head and it's still a level just below Plurk on the usability scale. Sure, it's an application/API that developers like to create, which is great if you're IconFactory or one of the other companies creating cool apps, but Twitter is still niche relative to the big players and is being used (smartly, I might add) by those looking to influence the digerati (see: Comcast).

Think about this -- Google can develop and integrate and create way faster than Twitter can ever hope to do. And for that reason alone I say Jaiku (and Facebook's recent comment addition to user's status messags) will win in the long run. Fail whale, anyone?

What keeps me around Twitter is the community and simplicity of it. Of course, that was BEFORE they suspended my account :-(

I'm waiting to see what happens. If I lose my 1,500+ followers then I think I may say adios to Twitter once and for all.

This coming from a guy who:
- created The Nothing Show, a comedy podcast based on Twitter tweets.
- designed his business card after Twitter (ironically, I just ordered my second batch today!)
- created a free five minute screencast tutorial on Twitter for newbies
- presented at PodCamp Nashville and PodCamp Toronto on how to build brands using Twitter
- started a Communication 2.0 series of interviews with cool companies who "get" Twitter like Comcast, Zappos, H&R Block and FreshBooks.
- made a celebratory 8,000th tweet video compilation
- and countless blog posts
- designed a silly t-shirt

Clearly I love Twitter, but without my friends I have no use for it.

I hope things get fixed quickly. I don't want to say goodbye to my favorite blue bird (I won't mention the whale).

Cheers!

Sure, Chris, leave it to you to write Dave-bait. Look at them, they all can't resist. ;)

We've all built too much social equity in Twitter to change platforms now. It's not like switching from MySpace to Facebook. Twitter is a real platform with valuable interaction, not just some website where old girlfriends from high school can look you up.

Also, I've never experienced such complete addiction to non-game software before. Even the downtime and FAIL are just part of the crack cocaine that is Variable Intermittent Reward.

It should be pointed out that there is another way Twitter is better than Jaiku: one can sign up for a new Twitter account. Jaiku is closed to anyone who hasn't already got an account, and it doesn't look to be open for registrations for a good long time.

I do, however, have to voice support for Identi.ca. Until Twitter re-enables public Jabber/XMPP support it's useless to me. I'm willing to take a following hit in a move in exchange for a service that doesn't artificially cripple features.

Agreed, Chris. It's really amazing the number of little apps that have appeared to add functionality to Twitter. I find a new one almost every day.

No doubt that Twitter's strategy of open architecture has led to the development of the ecosytem you reference, which in turn keeps us all tied in that much tighter to Twitter despite it's now-you-see-it, now-you-don't SLAs.

Here's another David biting the bait. :-)

Now my two cents. Also, and not to forget, Twitter was first in the category. Al Ries would say it's the 1st Law of Marketing in action.

The way I see it, Twitter planted its flag on top of a mountain of people who like to use their desktop browsers as a water cooler. And some of those people also like to buy accessories like teal-coloured tee shirts with flying whales. Twitter wins big in these two camps, having built a lazyweb ecosystem on the basis of simplicity, not scalability.

But I interact with the web most of the time while mobile. It's relatively easy where I live in Ireland because I'm hit by 3G signals coming from at least three different directions on the course of my daily 80 mile travels. In that kind of working environment, I get what I need from Jaiku but more importantly, I don't have to rely on Twitter for companionship, research, social networking, or brand-building. For those who need these kinds of by-products, I hope you can get an opportunity to see how a Jaiku clone runs on the Google App Engine. The alpha I've seen offers a kind of telepresence and location-awareness that extends my productivity.

I cannot say that I've become more productive with Twitter, although I'm less bored when I swim with its socialable whales.

Insightful comment.

Refer Kaplan and Nortons' books on the Balanced Score Card and on strategic Alignment - they talk about a "locked in" strategy - that is precisely the story here.

Agreed. The 2 big draws to Twitter over *every* other similar platform are a)already developed apps to make up for shortcomings and b)networks we spent months building.

I'd go to kwippy.com any day over any of the other Twitter-clones - but some of my favorite people will never be there.

Besides, it's kind of become a love/hate relationship where every week we wait to see what new curve Twitter will throw at us to make us all kvetch about them.

The capping, the disappearing followers, the failwhale parades - it's never really boring, is it?

I suspect Google is going to pump plenty of money into its recent acquisition of Jaiku. Twitter management should have found that news very disquieting.

What if we're not just talking about Jaiku? What if it's Identi.ca , as Matt pointed out?

David Binkowski above hit on a HUGE one. If Jaiku gives me my gmail inbox as a friend base, I'm in forever. Because I use gmail constantly, and that's my *real* social network.

Thoughts?

(And weird how much Twitter dislikes people named Dave).

Identi.ca launched less than a month ago and already has some impressive tools/integration including tracking over IM. It's open source and the creators REALLY care that you keep control over your own data. What other service can say that?

I'm MarinaMartin on Identi.ca and I encourage people to head over and check it out. It's a viable alternative with lots of new apps/features on the way, a strong core team, and a growing community already.

Once upon a time, I had 5 followers on Twitter. You've got to start somewhere.

Given your earlier posts about some arbitrary decisions with Twitter, I think the big parent should be explored further.

Twitter has some a lot of interesting off shoots and maybe a good teacher vs big parent analogy is an apt topic.

Its what you enable others to do. The teach a man to fish versus feeding a man to fish.

good write-up (as expected;) what's your take on www.twittersqueeze.com?

Chris,

Spot on, mate! I haven't used Jaiku so I cannot compare. I like your use of the word ecosystem, it's on target and appropriate. Twitter is here to stay, that's my prediction.

Cheers!
David Tinney
David Tinney - no BS or Hype Allowed

I love Twitter, it really is cool and super easy, when it behaves :-)
Thanks,
JR

With all of it's failings, Twitter captured our imaginations and attention enough that it created a new industry, much like an iPod. Microsoft's Zune had features we would have liked, iPod had publicized equipment failures yet it still dominated. Twitter will be different in that it's failures are felt on a global scale. The smart move for Google would be to just purchase Twitter and stabilize the damn back end. While I don't like the idea of one company owning all of this stuff, I'm so Google dependant already that it wouldn't make much impact.

For me, starting with an API and partner strategy is absolutely critical, almost first. Dogfood your partner approach to build your own platform and once you have determined you are ready, open up that API and platform so that others can consume you as a media endpoint. If we agree that experiences are decentralized then this is the only model that rolls going forward.

Jaiku just doesn't even care anymore. I tried to sign up and have been waiting for my invite for over 4-5 months!

Well, I don't care and I'm entrenched in Twitter cause that is where my social graph is most fully expressed/developed.

Just discovered I'm one of the ones who lost her account. I'm one of Twitter's biggest supporters, was one of the top-followed librarians online and have promoted the service to others.

Twitter customer for 1 1/12 years, had brought together over 1500 followers (I was following over 1400). I am upset if I have been penalized for other people wanting to follow me. I was not online last night so didn't know it had been suspended.

Thanks for staying on top of this for us.

Cheers,
Connie

All Twitter users (myself included) suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. We are in love with the Fail Whale!

It's become quite obvious over the last few months that there is very little incentive (monetarily) for "Twitter, Inc." to stabilize the platform.

The best thing for the 'community' would be for some monolith to come along and gobble it up. Sure, give the reigns to Google. Not much has changed at YouTube since the acquisition (the board of directors at Google would also agree!! ha!).

I can live with ads (that i pay no attention to anyhow) as a trade off for a stable platform with money in the coffers to sustain and grow.

I think it's hard to compare Jaiku with Twitter since in my usage they have grown in different ways. As part of the Swedish "social media bubble" (we still are in some sort of pioneering/early adopterstage generally in Sweden) the Jaiku is a new sort of "discussionforum" since it work very seamlessly in threading the replies on a post. Twitter is in my point of view much more "microblog" in the sense of the posts is on their own. Identi.ca is interesting in the sense of being open source-software that means that I could use it (in the future) to set up internal micro-blogging services for my customers - but as a clone of Twitter it serves no new functionality in my perspective, neither do Plurk nor Pownce. Al Ries 1st in market-rule is important, and to be remarkable the new micro-blogservices will have to do something more than the runner ups we've seen up til now.

...The greatness of Twitter isn't the service in itself but the fluid API that make mashups easy to innovate...

Twitter used to be great and so ARE all the extra software apps but I've already reached the point where ALL that good stuff has been overcome by the BAD.

You're in a different world Chris and you know it. Because of your huge following on Twitter you would never leave Twitter. In your position I wouldn't either.

But for normal social media users like myself Twitter isn't worth it anymore. The only reason I'm not 100% on Plurk right now is because it doesn't have SMS support. Instead I'm using Jaiku as a twitter alternative because it does the job reliably, HAS the extra features I use and appreciate (like comments) and amazingly it WORKS.

I looked the other way with Twitter and all their problems for the last 12 months and now I'm done. After that many problems for that length of time I have no choice but to accept that the Twitter organization is unhealthy. They can't get it together and that's sad for all of us.

Chris,

Your post captures the conflicting priorities Twitter faces. Opening up the APIs and promoting an open architecture, doing their best to nurture an ecosystem, was essential for growth. Paradoxically being too open and growing too fast has caused confusion in Twitter. Cancelling passionate supporters’ accounts, capping follower figures, and other inconsistencies in how they operate show there aren’t clearly defined processes for how to handle these scalability challenges. That is the paradox of building an ecosystem that has taken off so fast.

Personally, Twitter is a great learning tool. I am amazed at the amount of knowledge some people put out. I follow people to learn form them and also be entertained, and stay connected with people I’ve met in person. In all of these interactions, from a Twitter standpoint, a viable business model hasn’t emerged yet.

The catalyst for Twitter’s economic growth must be the ecosystem, building that out and adding to its functionality while turning scalability into a non-issue. It would be great to chart the incidence of Fail Whale screens to the growth of developers, because the latter will pressure Twitter to solve scalability issues quickly.

In my point of view, Jaiku is a better platform and therefore don't need all these "apps" to be kick-ass.

And, as deeped pointing out, Jaiku is more open for discussions then Twitter. And that's why the most interesting Twitter posts beeing a discussion thread on Friendfeed and the most interesting Jaiku posts stay at Jaiku.

At some point any successful social network's core asset shifts from its technology, features or capabilities to the network itself. It's Metcalfe's Law kicking in. Social networks die because they never reach the ignition point for Metcalfe's Law to start working. In twitter's case, the API accelerated the service toward's ignition of Metcalfe's Law by letting 3rd party developers create applications that the people at twitter hadn't thought of or didn't have the resources to build. Open systems win over the long run, and an API is part of being open.

"BUT, there are no real tools for Jaiku. There’s no Summize. There’s no Tweetstats. There’s no Twitter ANYTHING built around it."

You forgot: http://jaiku.lemonad.org/ + Firefox add-on Jaikungfu.

Jaiku wins IMO because everything I need is right there. Jaiku's threads creates dialogues that Twitter never can do on their own without Summize (now Twitter search) or Friendfeed help.

One Swede, have worked out a plugin (http://jaiku.lemonad.org/) for Jaiku that make it much more usable than before - and the m.jaiku.com is nifty on the Iphone/IpodTouch as well as the S60-app on Jaiku is much better than say twibble.

What limits does FriendFeed place?

Goes back to Eric Raymond's piece, "Cathedral and the Bazaar". Same concept regarding the difference between Linux and MSoft...

I can watch you play with your toys, or you can let me play too...which sandbox would YOU prefer to be in?

I've just returned from a holiday in the Land of Enchantment, where I grew up. You have touched on something: community trumps interface. I liken Twitter (which has been practically unusable by me for several months) and other, prettier social networking tools to two communities in Santa Fe. The southside Guadalupe community has a long Hispano tradition. The neighborhood is home to workers and their families who have struggled and succeeded in remaining in Santa Fe as generation of their families have before them, despite poverty, rising cost of living (cost of living in Santa Fe is comparable to the Bay Area but wages are about half), and the ravages of drugs, crime, and poverty. The community is vibrant: a thriving arts community (many Hispano artists work in traditional styles and genres; recently a large statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, an international artwork, combining artists from the Guadalupe community in Santa Fe and artists in Mexico, was brought to the neighborhood, with a resulting fiestas and community excitement) is drawing gentrifiers to the neighborhood. Las Campanas, on the other hand, is a gorgeous planned and gated community. Jack Nicklaus golf courses, equestrian trails, spas, gyms, etc. But it's not a community, despite the advertising. No one wants to go there to see or make art. I've driven past on my way to other places of interest; it's not one of them.

"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence. "

ebrown, exactly! I think that is part of Twitter's popularity. Visiting Twitter is like driving through Guadalupe and seeing the ecletic people and ideas. Having grown up in the Southwest and visited Santa Fe I can readily relate to your allegory. Part of Twitter's appeal is the chance to hang out and be yourself, but mostly it is to learn from eclectic and interesting people.

Mine was deleted for no reason as well. They claim I was violating TOS.. but I'm just a normal user..

http://getanewbrowser.com/2008/08/twitter-delet...

Jaiku was hip and hot and happening. Since Google bought the service no new developments, nothing. A shame. Seems to be the story when Google buys you.

Why didn't Google buy Twitter? I think Twitter was more happening than Jaiku. Twitter has less effort to join for everyone, rather than Jaiku which needs invitation. I have a guess that Twitter is more profitable, but by all means, Google has the money.