Tags : Jaiku, plurk, pownce, Twitter
Twitter Has Jumped The Shark
Notice something about Twitter lately besides the constant downtime? It’s gotten quiet. Not deadly quiet, but when it is up every day there seems to be less and less being said. In my case gone are the days where I could use Twitter to track the latest breaking story or the days I had dozens of conversations. It’s not just me, Dave Winer and Rafe Needleman have both noticed as well, and others have privately made similar observations to me over the last week.
Twitter has jumped the shark.
“It’s not just down time on Twitter lately that has made the service sit somewhere between frustrating and useless. Even when Twitter is up, updates/ refreshes fail, pages don’t load and third party tools can’t connect. There has been a lot of downtime…Twitter is a service you want to love. Like Blogger, Evan William’s earlier start up, it has not only become a market leader, it has been vital in creating a new online service market focused on IM.”
I wrote those words in a post on TechCrunch in May 2007, and back then coming out and saying enough is enough with Twitter was pretty controversial. The post had 31 trackbacks and a range of comments, but people kept on using Twitter because ultimately that was where the community was, something competing services, despite superior platforms, could not find. I soon realized that Twitter users were a dedicated, loyal bunch who would stick with the service no matter what. But even this dedicated loyalty had a limit, and suddenly it seems that at long last people have had enough and are either abandoning Twitter or like me, spending less time on it.
Plurk has been one recipient on the growing Twitter backlash (our review here). Plurk has already become a love it or hate it service, but the remarkable thing I’ve noticed is that it has grown a large, mainstream active community overnight, the missing ingredient from Pownce and Jaiku. However it’s not Twitter, and it never will be. It has benefited from Twitter’s problems, but it isn’t going to replace it.
Perhaps the saddest thing with Twitter jumping the shark in the loss of the Twitter community, as Dave Winer writes “People wondered what would replace it (Twitter). It’s becoming clear the answer to that is the worst possible one — nothing. The energy of Twitter is evaporating. Which is terrible.” I’m still hopeful that enough people will decide to migrate to one service that it becomes a Twitter replacement, however to what? FriendFeed could build a Twitter killer but they haven’t, Jaiku is a great platform sitting on Google’s servers…but it’s closed for signups, Pownce is…well…Pownce, and Plurk has no API.
The obvious business opportunity: somebody comes out with a Twitter competitor with API and scalability. If you’ve got one ping me so I can take a look and give it a plug.
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twitter is still the Fonz until he's replaced; I'd be pretty pleased to see folks migrate to FF
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as much as i want to disagree i cant, great post duncan
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I wouldn't say I "like" this, per se, because it bums me out. But, it's VERY insightful.
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Brad, I don't like it either, but people are definitely starting to give up on Twitter. I'm still sticking around, but as I said in the post, I'm spending a lot less time on Twitter now...and not just because I spend far too much time on FriendFeed now instead :-)
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It's true
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ok who wants to start development if only I knew how to code. I think that twitter is goin down very fast and not even green line will help them what is consencus on deveolopment langue of choice?
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Duncan - I'm not convinced it's dead yet IF they fix it like fast!
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Duncan, your observations are probably correct if you only observe the community you're following. The same trend might be true amongst the other 1,499,999+ Twitter users, or it might not be. The fact that Twitter is still running into performance and availability issues tells me that people are NOT abandoning Twitter in droves. Personally, I haven't noticed a marked decline in stream activity.
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Dewald, I'm not alone in observing this and the links are in the post. Two respected guys noticed the same thing, and I'm pretty sure my Australian friends aren't in Dave Winer's community. If you haven't, great. Also I don't think performance is always directly related to load (or conversely that lower loads would fix the problem), I simply believe that the whole thing is probably broken now.
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Charlie, didn't say it was dead, said it has jumped the shark: past its prime, past its peak. Having said that, the longer the problems continue, the more people (in Rafe's words) they'll bleed.
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I love the picture accompanying the post.
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Duncan, when I look through my FF stream, most of the content consists of Twitter tweets. Without that, FF mostly turns into a self-promotional tool where folks promote their own blog posts. Bleh. I don't need that in my life. It's only now and again that one finds a worthwhile FF-only post.
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+1 Dewald
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You got a point Dewald.
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In addition, I think it's counter-productive for blog post discussions to occur on FF (like this one). Your blog post currently has only 5 comments, while this FF entry has 14 comments. Folks who find your post via Google don't have access to these FF comments. And, your blog isn't benefiting from all the fresh user-generated content these comments produce.
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If everyone's Twitter feed and FriendFeed feed looked the same, this argument would have a point.
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Dewald, Duncan has the FriendFeed plugin, so his FF comments will show up on his blog. Did you visit his blog?
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I just need friendfeed to develop into a viable mobile platform. I love my Twitterberry.
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Simon, you mean like http://fftogo.com ?
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Bah... another web2.0 helper tool with no account/password encryption
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Bwana, oops, I apologize. I didn't scroll down far enough. Perhaps the FF plugin should be modified so that it merges the FF comments in with the native blog comments.
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Plurk started at a time when Twitter is in crisis, so it seems to me that they are "lucky" to be receiving quite some publicity. If Pownce or Jaiku had only started at this period of time, would they have been able to grow a "large, mainstream active community overnight"? I would think so.. Plurk executed on perfect timing in this case.
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Winston, good observation. I'm seeing a lot of my non-techie friends flock to it as well, I suspect it has greater appeal outside the geek/ tech scene
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I really think this Twitter mass exodus is greatly exaggerated. A few hundred people in an echo chamber noisily complaining about Twitter and threatening to leave it might sound like the end for Twitter but I strongly disagree. Like it or not, there are lot of people outside of the echo chamber who have latched on to Twitter and they have zero interest in FriendFeed, Plurk, or whatever the next thing is. I will admit that the early adopters are disenchanted but there is a bigger world out there.
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@Duncan as in my post this evening the FF interface might appeal to the tech / early adopter but it won't to real web users .. Plurk on the other hand will because it is animated and colorful (the colors might suck but that is neither here nor there)
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There's still a chance for Twitter. I think most of us are rooting for the app to successfully fix performance issues. BUT, squawkers are loudly shouting 'red rover!' and it gets harder to stay.
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Not even tons of money can save Twitter if the influencers start shifting attention somewhere else. Who was it that said influencers don't matter? Anderson? Fail. I'm watching it happen right now, in this post actually, and over the past 3-weeks across many other influenced laden bloggers. I call b.s. Influence matters big time. Oh yeah, and timing is f-ing everything. Everything.
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Dewald, turn the Tweets off, find some new friends. I share more from other people's sites than I even do my own stuff, and so do a lot of the people I follow. I find a ton of interesting stuff that way, and if there's the occasional bit of self promotion so be it, but it's not the be all and end all of FF, at least my FriendFeed experience.
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@stvehodson agree. The mix on Plurk is defintely not got a tech/ geek bias. My non-techie/ first adopter friends seem to be thriving there. FF though can mainstream, but I'll concede it's not a shiny and friendly to non firstadopters/ geeks.
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it won't help matters either if the developers get fed up and start switching their attention elsewhere
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just because someone signs up for plurk, doesn't mean their abandoning Twitter, it will be interesting how long people will stay with Plurk, it seems a little confusing to me. Twitter is so simple.
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We have had people using Twitter as a serious communication tool carving out connections and opportunities for business. In those circumstances you need something that you can rely on which we obviously can't at present. Regardless of the service or other means adopted, these connections are going to be taken elsewhere to more reliable platform and, once establishe, will not return irrespective of how reliable Twitter becomes again in the future. It's a big loss.
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@Colin .. ya .. I can just see Plurk in a corporate boardroom or on the big screen at conferences like they have with Twitter in the past :)
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Occasional downtime wouldn't bother me as much. I'd probably huff and puff a little and keep going, but it's impossible to be active on a site when it simply doesn't load or craps out when you try to perform some sort of action. Anyway, I'm using friendfeed to keep up on things now, even tweets.
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Agreed. Twitter is seeing strong adoption by my non tech friends. The gadly Scoble types might move on, but a real userbase is still there.
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plurk is cool just need IM service back online +1 for jaiku
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I agree with Mike Doeff's opinion that this Twitter mass exodus is greatly exaggerated. Look, even if all of Robert Scoble's 26,537 Twitter followers "exodus" from Twitter, that still leaves roughly 1,473,463+ other users, many of whom don't know any of the tech influencers and couldn't care less what they say and where they go next. An influencer exodus might kill your personal interest in Twitter. It wouldn't kill Twitter for everybody.
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Dewald: I am not leaving Twitter. As long as there are early adopters still there, I'll be there, no matter how much pain it brings us all. Now, if we all move somewhere else? I'll follow them there too. I'm on Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, and here, for instance.
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so the a-listers have an inferior product in twitter, aka heroin, right now and following the sage advice of stringer bell they have renamed it - friendfeed and plurk - both interesting products in their own right, but not quite perfect substitutes either. i still find myself agreeing with steve gillmor, the junkies will return, they're just waiting for a better product. it's very hard to stay straight...
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At least if some of the A-listers leave, there will be less noise for the rest of us.
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OK, first Jeremiah turns meme into a contraction that is off from its original meaning...now "jumping the shark" is being misused. Perhaps, if Twitter became the subject of a sitcom, like Til Death, as opposed to even say The Big Bang Theory, that might be JTS. But downtime and bad service and limited feature sets is simply not delivering to its audience.
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