Twitter, the ever-popular microblogging service, has had major site outages and bugs lately. And the usually enthusiastic Twitter user-base is growing frustrated 140-characters at a time. So if Twitter doesn’t recover soon, they may never recover at all. This site is becoming a great example for companies of how important basic service features are, like reliability.
Regular Twitter users come to the Web site to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to each other — one big digital chart room. But the key part of the conversation — the “Replies” functionality which lets users communicate and have conversations — has been down, taking a lot of the fun out of the service.
Becoming less fun is the worst thing that could happen to twitter, who right now is far ahead of it’s competition…
But here’s the rub: Twitter’s site outages could create a lull in popularity that allows alternative, similar sites a window for success…
a) Twitter wins early adopters and establishes a strong core user base.
b) Frequent site downtime begins to erode Twitter’s popularity.
c) Frustrated with the service, Twitter users flock to competitors like. Pownce and Jaiku.
d) Competitors grow exponentially through a mass exodus of Twitter’s audeince, and new consumer adoption.
I was thinking about this yesterday while participating in a Twebinar (www.twebinar.com). Twitter’s Replies feature is down, as is their tracking feature, which makes it really hard to have a conversation (impossible, in fact, using Twitter alone). Without services like Summize and third party apps like Twhirl, I think that a lot more people would be moving to other services and it would be hard to see Twitter succeeding at all.
But, and this confirms the importance of the current debate on “who owns your friends,” people already have networks of friends on Twitter and nobody wants to rebuild that. So instead, the conversation during the Twebinar happened on Twitter, with people using one Summize window to track the Twebinar conversations, another to track replies to your own comments, and then either the Twitter website or a third party app to actually respond.
[...] is immensely popular but with a lot moaning and groaning behind the scenes. Number one gripe among users, observers and critics is downtime. It seems that the popularity was not expected and therefore the architecture is no match for the [...]