Category: Technology Author : Duncan Riley Posted: September 17, 2008
Tags : Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Pyra Labs, Twitter
News broke yesterday that traffic on Twitter is up 422% in the last 12 months, despite a year that introduced the fail whale into popular culture, and where service outages on other sites were routinely assessed as not being bad compared to Twitter.
Twitter should be the startup that has failed. The management of the company has been at very best grossly incompetent. Twitter was sold as a social utility, but it regularly failed to deliver, driving a new wave of microblogging services that aimed to take over where Twitter failed. For Twitter users, the question for a time wasn’t whether Twitter was down, but if it was up.
And yet, Twitter continues to thrive, even if it still seemingly doesn’t have a business plan, and any source of revenue.
While CEO Jack Dorsey deserves much of the credit, the two other founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams lay claim to much of the blame. Both worked with each other at Pyra Labs, and used that knowledge to build Twitter as a CMS platform, instead of a messaging service. And yet, who can dispute the numbers: Twitter has not only survived its darkest hour, a time where any other startup would have failed, Twitter has thrived.
Twitter has defied logic from the start, and that it thrives today defies logic again. Although I’m not religious, there can only be one conclusion: Evan Williams and Biz Stone are blessed. If anyone has a more logical conclusion, feel free to leave a comment 
(img credit Mai Le)
Sep 17, 2008
Great post – I can't agree with the 'Blessed' logic. Rather I would say that the people that use Twitter are the ones that have created the value. Regardless of if the site is up or down people will continue to use the site whilst their personal networks continue to deliver value. When Twitter collapsed several weeks ago and wiped all of my followers panic set in, I was not alone in searching out and registering on alternative Microblogging sites. The problem with this however was that my network became dispersed over several sites, loosing it's value and convenience immediately. So when Twitter came back to life and my followers reappeared everyone conveniently forgot the problems.
It is the people you follow and those that follow you that give the value.
Sep 17, 2008
They're not the only startup to go through a bad period and come out on top. I remember when Last.fm (then called Audioscrobbler) would quite regularly lose user data. Now it's highly reliable and going from strength to strength.
Sep 17, 2008
Remember that the fail whale is only a topic of discussion around the early adopters. By the time the later adopters and CNN had shown up, either the problems had been fixed or the newer people used Twitter at the 1-2 tweets a day level and hardly noticed the fail whale. Yes, they still have no business plan, but at this stage I really don't care any more, and CNN hasn't asked that question yet.
Sep 17, 2008
I bet Morten Lund would agree. He's the guy that just lost a personal fortune after his baby, Danish newspaper Nyhedsavisen went bust even with massive investment, great journalists, and so on.
His honest-joe account of the failure on his blog (in English) http://lundxy.com/?p=3182 reads like a Bonfire for the Vanities Web 2.0.
Sep 17, 2008
Finally somebody dares to criticize the obviously incompetent Twitter management. TechCrunch (and all the other big bloggers) would have trashed any other start-up. They were as nice to them as you could be, never personally criticizing them.
But who really wondered – Blogger is crap, too. Even though it’s years since it’s been taken over by Google, it still has an inferior software, but they started so far behind it’s not even funny anymore.
Sep 17, 2008
Twitter should have failed?
Nah. I know what you mean, but I can't count the A-listers that spend more time
on Twitter everyday than on their own sites!
I describe it as my home page.