Dave Winer: "Twitter is a ghost town"

So, the interesting thing, to me, is that a few weeks ago everyone was discussing the axing of Blaine Cook from the Twitter team for his "failure to scale". Turns out, nobody else in the company can scale Twitter or keep it online reliably, either. Huh. Must be a hard problem. It's probably a good time for folks to apologize to Blaine for piling all the blame on one guy for a problem that, in reality, took the whole development team to create and will take the whole development team to solve. (And it's time for everyone to stop pretending scaling can be solved by one magic bullet or another...if you don't build, or rebuild, to scale, you won't scale.)

Here's an off-the-cuff prediction: Twitter itself, as well as the Twitter community, will be just fine. In a year or two nobody will remember these problems.

Twitter may have scaling problems, but it's not as if their potential competitors are magically immune to those. Meanwhile, Twitter holds a huge marketing advantage -- you can't say "Site X is just like Twitter" without saying "Twitter" -- and a big Metcalfe's Law advantage: Everyone who is remotely interested in Twitter-like sites already has a Twitter account, and those accounts won't magically disappear. Meanwhile, there will be more than one Twitter competitor, all desperately trying to distinguish themselves from each other as well as from the original.

Sooner or later Company X will figure out how to scale Twitter. At which point either Company X buys Twitter for the name and the userbase, Twitter buys Company X for the technology, or Google buys everybody. Or, Twitter eventually reverse-engineers the superior architecture, at which point they will beat Company X over the head with superior name recognition and larger userbase. This is especially true if Company X is actually the open-source community -- if some random Python programmer manages to create a superior, open-source Twitter architecture, Twitter will just install it on a server farm within a month and be right back in the game. The open-source movement has a lot of brilliant techies, but I doubt that its marketing team can outrace Twitter's from a standing start.

The Twitter concept has enough mindshare that I doubt it can just evaporate. They're not being sued out of existence like Napster. I'm not convinced that a scalable Twitter is physically impossible. So I would suggest that rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated. It's just... resting.

Twitter is very active from where I'm standing.

I started using twitter a lot more right before blaine left. Now I barely use it because the IM integration is gone. Hopefully someone will move forward to implement the distributed twitter on top of XMPP and Pubsub. There is already a tentative little XEP: http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/microblogging.html

This is a wild guess, but from what I've seen Tumblr is picking up a lot of momentum. It's started to attract a pretty smart community and it's building steam. I don't know if it's a REPLACEMENT for Twitter, but it serves the same purpose but without the downtime.

The magic simply has vanished. Twitter just isn't as....fun anymore. It's kind of like the eerie silence you have when you've been informed someone you know has passed away.