Twitter: The beginning of the end?
hypecycles.wordpress.com
hypecycles.wordpress.com
And doesn't this joker think people have created Twitter clones? Identi.ca, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. None of these have succeeded because they are in some degree crappier than Twitter. Plus, users matter. Why use something similar to Twitter if no one cares and there's no one to follow?
Ridiculous linkbait.
Umm. Sorry? Come again? None of these have succeeded? By exactly which metric are you measuring success here?
Please explain exactly how twitter is even as successful as friendfeed let alone facebook.
edit: -1 points for questioning how you're measuring friendfeed and facebook as failures? My how times have changed.
Have you seen either of these on CNN or heard them on the radio? No. They were latecomers that offer little to their users past a service they're already using (likely Twitter or something else).
People have been saying this about Twitter since it only had ten users. It was a bit more believable back when Twitter was all-Fail Whale, all the time.
Now it just looks like a joke. If you want to predict that Twitter will suffer from competition you must at least name the competition. I see that you kept your list of names safely behind a link. That was a good choice, because the list makes the joke even funnier. (Skittr? Yonkly? Kwippy? Were these auto-generated? Has anyone actually heard of any of these things? My favorite example is the mighty "Dukudu" empire: "auctioned off on eBay, acquired by allesklar.de for EUR 43,208". Ooh, a whole EUR 43k! I'm sure the guys on Sand Hill Road are trembling with fear.)
(Not that I begrudge these projects their marketshare. I'm sure they're being run by fine people. I have a funny idea for a microblogging site myself, and I might even launch it with a hilariously silly name. But I'll try to resist the urge to have delusions of grandeur.)
Incidentally, how can a business simultaneously have no business model and be mortally threatened by a patent infringement suit? If the patent troll wins and is awarded a 12% royalty, do they have to accept 12% of the losses? ;)
Twitter is very good to developers. The only cases where there are altercations are when people use the word "Twitter" in their service's name. That's defending their trademark - something all companies need to do if they want to keep those trademarks.
Twitter's not headed for big trouble at all - or at least, that trouble will have nothing to do with the problems mentioned in the article. The main trouble on Twitter's road, imho, is the big battle they're having with Facebook. There'll probably only be one winner in that one.
I'd be really surprised if Twitter win it out, facebook just look ridiculously clued in to how to beat them, whereas I haven't really seen any changes at twitter in terms of features. Have they added any? :/ Strike that... have they added back in the features they removed?
edit: yeah downmod me all you like... or you could reply with a coherent argument.
I think also that this idea that Twitter and Facebook are in a head to head battle is mostly media generated. Twitter's strength is its public nature, and Facebook's is its private nature. To say that one will beat the other is to say that either there is no need for private conversation or no need for public.
If you look back at the last year or so, facebook has moved massively... Yes Twitter could add all the features, and remove things like the 140 char limit, but they don't seem to have moved all that much in the same time. Facebook clearly has the momentum and opportunity.
I do think the battle is pretty real, I don't want to go to 2 sites to share stuff, I just want one. And I can - I just post stuff to facebook, and say [Family] or [Friends] or [everyone]. It's pretty much already there.
Here's my theory: no way.
- Defaults rule. If the facebook default is for private than that will be the bulk of conversation and that will set the expectation about how to respond (i.e. it limits forwarding of good posts to strangers).
- Both sites benefit from being simple and easy to use. For Facebook to suddenly imbue every activity (posting, reading, and finding friends) with an understanding of access controls would make it a much more complex site to understand.
Facebook may be copying features, but I don't think it has a chance of becoming the primary tool for public asynchronous messaging any more than it has of becoming the primary blogging platform or primary email platform.
Twitter, is not copying Facebook features because those features don't support its goal for public discourse. Instead they are developing deep contacts with media.
In the end, Facebook may end up with more users than Twitter, but that's an indication of the size of the markets not of one company beating the other.
Both sites grew last month by the way, so it does seem like talking about the demise of either one is backward. Twitter's 6% monthly growth rate compounds to more than 100% per year (if only my investments would do that).
Whereas Twitter intially things open and encourages others to create their features. They are focusing on making their service as reliable and simple as possible. Want more features, well there is an web app for that.
By using the same logic as yours, Facebook Marketplace should have beaten Craigslist by now. Or Match.com should have beaten plentyoffish. Or, hell, Reddit should have beaten Hacker News. But they haven't happened, despite all being technically superior and having supersets of the others functionality.
* the number of registered users on Twitter and the network between those users,"
Exactly my thoughts. There is a real need for that, just add "distributed" to the equation, where nobody controls the ecosystem.
If I were google I'd be revamping jaiku with a cooler name and start pushing distributed microbbloging as the new platform (perhaps joining it with blogger). The same for Wordpress and other blogging platforms.
Twitter will adapt or die. But will no longer have the strict control over the ecosystem it has today.