Twitter is the hot social network du jour. But for the life of me, I am having a hard time figuring out why. It keeps crashing (as it did again this weekend) and the experience is lousy. And no, Twitter can’t blame Joyent for its problems anymore. This social network clearly has structural problems that go beyond hosting.
Quite frankly, the live interaction leaves something to be desired, too. Yes, it’s outstanding for real time conversation and discussion. These values have been well discussed, here and on other blogs.
A new wave of users have joined Twitter, and etiquette seems to be wavering. It can be awful receiving personality attacks, unsolicited pitches, spam, and yes, even unwelcome advances (Someone recently sent me a rather unexpected and unwelcome home made movie link). Most of these situations are resolved with an unfollow, but they seem to keep coming. And while completely reasonable given the public microblog, it can be unnerving when people can cite tweets of mine from days, even weeks ago. It’s caused me to be more cautious about what I tweet.
The whole Twitter experience leaves me wanting to run away sometimes. Quite frankly, the duel combo of increased outages and unwelcome community behavior has caused me to do just that on increasingly frequent occasions.
If things continue on the current trajectory, Twitter’s hotness may be very temporary. FriendFeed is continuing to gain traction, and of course another social network can rise to fulfill the needed micro echo chamber of conversation. The competitors must be gearing up.
You know Geoff, we may not always (or even often) see eye to eye, but with all of the insane chatter about the twittersphere lately (had to unsubscribe from at least five newsletters alone just because they couldn’t seem to talk about anything else), this post was refreshing.
The reliability issues are nothing new for Twitter, and I’ve been sitting back and waiting to watch the Internet marketing crowd come in and muck it up – from your post it sounds like it’s happening sooner than I expected, even if not enough to drive most away yet (and I think I not-so-secretly delight in that realization).
If nothing else, it will be interesting to see the next hot thing to replace Twitter, what changes or improvements are made, and whether or not any type of social networking service is going to be able to really rise above the problems that eventually plague them all – downtime and spam being the most common.
Please allow me to join you in your frustrations. I have been using Twitter a lot lately, for Stanford Peace Innovation Project I am involved in, and yes, the thing keeps crashing at the most unwelcome moments. I also had a help question about hashtags and got no response.
They need to have a better flagging system. Makes you wonder who is in charge at Twitter?
Hey Geoff:
True that Twitter has not been functioning well lately, athough I have not received any questionable videos (yet). The most unique thing about Twitter for me has been the way it has allowed me to connect with people who otherwise would probably not give me the time of day. For example, I found out that Robert Scoble follows what he calls the “early adopters” on Twitter who followed him. Which means I can message him directly, which I just did (no response just yet ; – ) Similarly, I was able to communicate easily with Richard@Dell, since I got connected to him on Twitter through NewCommForum. He seems like a nice guy who would probably respond to emails as well, but Twitter feels like a “special” connection.
I am sure the quality of Twitter communications will become degraded, and the early adopters will be off and running onto something new. It will be a shame to lose those the more tenuous connections that we have made, even if it’s because of the novelty of the tool.
~K
Jenn: We may be more alike than you think. I think you’ll see someone take Twitter function like Facebook, add it to their social network and kill Twitter. Think paging and cell phones.
Marguerite: Whew, Pandora’s box on that Q.
Karen: Such is life, I guess. I for one am starting to flee.
I think it’s started to make me a more passive user of Twitter, at least in the sense that I don’t use it for conversation. In any case I’ve always thought it more suited to a listening tool (few other ways in which you can genuinely get access to industry leaders, and have their “first look” tweets to respond to) than a heavily interactive tool.
Still think it’s a good method of picking up information on social media, and getting quick messages out there (and getting a response). It beats FriendFeed for that, albeit FriendFeed has deeper functionality.
Reliability is an increasing issue for the network though, and I think Twitter have acknowledged that it’s actually being used in ways they hadn’t envisaged, and hadn’t developed the technological backup to cater for. If they can solve those issues I think it’ll remain a very valuable tool though.
As far as it getting gobbled or beat down by Facebook, I think there is something to having a REALLY simple service, which Twitter does.
Facebook does a lot. I’d almost argue that it does too much. I bet folks only use 30% of what FB has to offer out of the box.
I also don’t see competitors rising up and taking over. While it wasn’t first to market, it dominates it and the current early adopter fan boys are VERY loyal. Despite infrastructural issues, those same early adopter fanboys are going to stay there.
Now… if they wanna go mainstream, they will have to figure things out. Paris Hilton isn’t going to use Twitter if it’s down constantly but I’m confident Paris Hilton or a Britney Spears at some point would use a Twitter.
About unwanted messages… I think, like with any new medium, new cultural norms are going to have to be formed. People don’t know whats cool and not cool to tweet. Despite even what becomes the norm, there will still be trolls. They’ll figure out how to do better flagging abuse but that will come with iteration of the product.