The Business Web 2.0
As CEO of business-based social networking site WeCanDo.BIZ, read my take on the role Web 2.0 technologies can play helping businesses to grow.
Thursday 24 July 2008, 3:18 PM
Twitter tweets its own death warrant
Much has been made of Twitter's recent outages. But with today the worst day so far, Twitter could be about to find its previously loyal fanbase all disappear.
It's bad enough when you discover something and then can't stop using it, to the general detrement of your working day. When that thing occasionally disappears and you feel a bit sick when you can't tweet or read others tweets, you know things are bad.
But the worse day ever since Twitter burst onto our desktops, laptops and phones has arrived: not only has Twitter been down for much of the day, but when it was up many people found that the list of "followers" they had built up over time had shrunk, either because the connections were no longer being applied, or because peoples accounts had disappeared altogher.
Paul Greenberg, someone I follow (and can, at this point, still see) writes: "About 30% of those I'm following [and] the same of those following me [have] GONE!! Will have to reconstruct. Disgusting.”
Twitter has posted an update on the status of the missing data at http://status.twitter.com/post/43329900/updated-follower-following-counts, but it seems to have appeased few.
Twitter fan and Socially Minded author Matthew Brazil writes in his latest blog: "How on earth do you lose so much information? If Twitter has a currency it has just dropped through the floor. Over the last few days they have been haemorrhaging data at a staggering rate; lost Tweets, Followers and Followees. Why do we put up with it? I am beginning to question the viability of Twitter as a useful tool. In theory it’s fantastic but in practice it is somewhat different."
Downtime is something few in business tolerate. But lost data?
Could Twitter have tweeted its own death warrant?
Ian Hendry
WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
PreviousComments on this post
This may have been the "jump the shark" moment for Twitter given the outages and the general lack of apparent concern for their assets a.k.a. Twitterers or....whatever. They are piling up one problem after another.
The one thing that makes me think it will survive this round is that identi.ca and others aren't proving to be sticky at all. Most people flirt with something else and then go back to Twitter. Part of this is due to the rich Twitter client community and the additional features that the clients have which are make Twitter more interesting than its base product really is. Part of it is that there is a significant business potential surfacing around customer care as @ComcastCares shows. Part of it is that Summize actually is/was a valuable search tool and part of it is that it's part of the fabric of communications media that a lot of people are starting to use so inertia will play a role. Similar to not making the effort to change a telco because the cost of change is too great.
But they don't have much time left this way. They are acting foolishly or perhaps they don't know how to act any other way so they don't know what to do. They are Web 2.0 savvy but neither people nor business savvy it seems.
Pity, though. I like it. But I don't want to have to think about it too much - except in a business context if the need arises. As far as personal use goes, I'll continue for awhile and see what happens.
The ride is kinda interesting.
Thanks for the quote. :-)
Paul Greenberg, author: CRM at the Speed of Light (4th edition)
Great comments Paul. I was a cynic before I started about 6 weeks ago and took some joy at reading that the hard core of users amounted to few more than 300,000. I think that has grown a lot recently and that is when the issues started. Any other competitor probably has to also make that leap before they'll become a realistic alternative; and who says they'll survive the scaling either.
I also use Twitter through a BeTwittered widget within iGoogle, rather than going to the site. I sometimes SMS Tweets too. To be truly comparable I would need the first of these, otherwise it's too much like hard work to swap.
We have developed a business version of Twitter within our leads and referral network, enabling our members to post details of their most urgent need. This gets sent to their contacts, plus to members they don't know who may be able to help, matched on keywords. We use Biz Needs as a pro-active alternative to search and it's very popular. There is definitely a future for this kind of thing if it can be applied to solve real problems.
Ian Hendry
WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
