From Dave Winer:
Yes, it serves me right, and I, of all people, know better, than to build a network on a single point of failure, depending on one company, that is known for producing unreliable systems in an industry with incredibly thin skin (how can they get better if they won’t listen). In other words, this is hardly Murphy’s Law, it was easily predictable. It was likely.
From TechCrunch:
So while Robert Scoble speculates that FriendFeed is the big winner when Twitter goes down, and Dave Winer hacks together contingency plans for the next outage that remind me of stockpiling candles and bottled water for the next big storm, I just shake my head at how wonderfully we’ve all be had.
For others the Twitter habit started long ago. And for most people, it is yet to start. But the trend is clear: Twitter is becoming an Internet utility. And their monopoly power via the network effect they’ve earned means they don’t have to worry much about downtime. We’ll all still be sitting here patiently, waiting for it to return.
Haha, no, Tyme won’t be waiting patiently because Tyme was smart enough not to become dependent on a third party application like Twitter.
Let me be clear: I’m not right all the time, don’t want to be right all the time and hell, I even suck at some things but wow, the writing on the wall was blatant on this one and it’s further proof that, for some reason, we (as a whole) do not learn from past mistakes. From knowledge we’ve gained in the past.
When have monopolies EVER been a good thing? Monopolies are wonderful for the companies that own them but suck for the end-users dependent on them because the end-user is completely at their mercy…and they know it. But you want to know what the funniest part is? People have been laughing at Shel Israel’s videos but he nailed an interview with the Twitter guys (I’m talking about the content revealed in the video):
- They said that the average Twitter user should Twitter approximately 3 times a day. That’s right – 3 times a day. If you’re Twittering more than that, and became dependent on Twitter, you aren’t using it the way it was built to be used in the first place (you know, answering the question “what are you doing right now?”).
- The average Twitter user has about 10 followers and follow 10 people – like real life! Approximately 5% of their user base has a high number of followers.
- Twitter is being used more and more in business (helping companies extend their brand).
- They are focused on reliability because without reliable service they will not be able to expand. They are focused on making Twitter a global utility people rely on every day and once that happens, they will be monetize their services.
What does this mean? Their core audience probably didn’t notice their outage issues this weekend. Not to ignore the geeks but honestly, do you build a company for 5% of your users or the other 95%?
It’s Time to Find Another Solution
Twitter is a great application to use for conferences, if you’re traveling, etc. Some of the business applications would work as well. For the average person, there shouldn’t be a daily dependency on Twitter. There are more efficient ways to interact with people. Jumping to other third-party apps isn’t a solution either.
I’m not a programmer but it seems that the solution would be, instead of finding centralized solutions, to find a way to better aggregate information. And no, I don’t mean by being dependent on FriendFeed – another 3rd party application. As technology evolves I think the opportunity is there to create better applications (that we control) to aggregate information. We already have RSS, Atom, IM, etc. – are there ways to use them more efficiently? Why can’t my blog accept a text message from a cell phone (or IM client) if I authorized them to do so? Why aren’t there more sites like Technorati (which would be Tweetscan and Summarize for Twitter) to better aggregate data? Can hash tags be monitored on blogs/sites?
This is the problem I see with Dave’s solution of piping into FriendFeed. When Twitter goes down people flock over to FriendFeed – what is FriendFeed supposed to do, maintain extra hardware in the event Twitter goes down? Are we, as users, supposed to keep attempting to maintain profiles all over the internet, creating a ridiculous amount of duplicate information. Think about it, how many times have you encountered being subscribed to the blog, see a notification on their Twitter about the blog post, log into FriendFeed and see that same blog entry there, log into Facebook and see the imported note about the blog post there…it’s ridiculous. People cross-post because they want people to see their content. Bring the people back to the blog/site and they will. People using these services want followers and how many of them have more followers on a third-party site than their own blog/site? A high percentage unfortunately.
The root solution is to not be so spread out we rely on third party services to accumulate our own data in the first place. I could understand it better if FriendFeed only aggregated information but they allow commenting within FriendFeed, meaning content is being created in another area one has to monitor. Realistically for people using FriendFeed with their blog, their site is competing with FriendFeed with comments. If someone doesn’t use FriendFeed they are missing a portion of the conversation about your content. Does that make sense?
Instead of aggregating “me” from five different sites into one area, how about how about finding a solution to better aggregate blog/site content, where more than one company provides this service, giving users options and control over the content we are creating? I’m not a programmer but there seems like there should be a better, more efficient, way of creating different types of content in one area and aggregating it efficiently.
I think it will be a long time before the geeks wake up and realize the site hopping they do is getting old. All this money is invested in these sites and the race is to get out before everyone abandons the site for the next new craze.
Three times a day? They have stability problems because no-it-all geeks decided to use it however they wanted. The stability problems are their own fault. That’s funny. I never understood why the people who use it like IM don’t just use IM.
Scoble switches too much. Not too long ago he said Facebook was the shit. Then Twitter. Now FriendFeed. No idea how many people leap from website to website but it’s stupid. A handful of geeks (out of the world’s population) following them around does not translate to those people who only use Twitter 3 times a day doing the same thing. As you said, that’s the majority of the people using their service!
I’m signing my name to have people write in one place. I don’t want to look in more than two areas to keep up and I don’t want to create an account at SocialThing to keep up. I want everything in my feed reader where I can control it.
Funny that Technorati and Google are the only two search engines for blogs.
Geeks forgot what it was like before they were geeks. Their technology usage isn’t the norm and I think the Web 2.0 businesses fail because they never cross over. Who is going to update a site all day about what they are doing? I’ll take pictures and upload them later or stream(?) video.
“Haha, no, Tyme won’t be waiting patiently because Tyme was smart enough not to become dependent on a third party application like Twitter. ”
I laughed out loud.
I believe the appeal of these websites is the ease to gain followers/readers. On these websites people are able to do what they cannot on their own websites.
Yes, I agree. People use Twitter in attempts to bring people TO their site. That Mahalo guy said Twitter brought 20,000 people to his site. It would benefit everyone in the long run if better software was available to find the stuff we want to find and people subscribed to the main source the person has, their website.
Have you seen all the drama going on with Twitter? Some guy is selling his account, people using it to hike people going to their blogs and I guess that puppet guy has a destroying people because anyone else doing it is a copycat. Twitter is the geeks new toy. That’s all it is.
Now he’s not selling the account. This A-Listers are becoming more fickle and less trust-worthy every day.
I wish it would back to something the blogger owns. There are a lot of fake accounts and that makes following difficult.
There have always been people who center on whatever is new. They love to champion innovation & spread the word. Then there are later adopters who just want to use the stuff. If it’s social, they want to be where their current and potetial new friends can be most easily found. Twitter, like FB, email or FAX machines are just tools. Some, like hammers, last a long time. People should just use them as they see fit staying with them as long as they wish and no longer or so it seems ti me.
Good to see you Shel!
I understand the desire to try new things and be a pioneer. The problem is the burden places on people genuinely interested in following you. How many sites have you taken your users through while pioneering? Geeks love that kind of thing but most people aren’t geeks. I wish there was a way to see how many people are lost because a blogger is spread across so many services that people do not follow regularly.
I wish someone with technical experience would explain why these centralized services are so popular. Why can’t a blogger post something on their site, push it the Twitter, Facebook, etc. instead of putting it on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and trying to find a way to import it on a blog? Isn’t that what FriendFeed is doing? What about the next site that comes out? It KEEPS on happening. Enough already.
And you are right Tyme, monopolies are the worst.
More power if they want to keep joining these services. I follow their blog because I don’t have time to keep up and the quality is a lot lower. Most of these services generate noise.
I enjoyed Shel’s video but it bothers me when people go against how the owners built a site.
In Second Brain we try to aggregate all the content you create on various services into your personal library. We save everything in there for you.
Over time, even though you’ve been using many different and overlapping services, and some of which you’ve forgotten, everything is still in your Second Brain library and you can find it and retrieve it again.
I believe that all social applications will have a certain dynamic and that their audiences and user groups will be change very fast – at least faster than we’ve previously seen for pure utility applications.
There will always be something ‘in vouge” that people will try to follow – just like they follow fashion (some of them at least).
Content will be distributed, fragmented and social. If you want to control it, you have to aggregate it yourself. It’s about trying to keep track of everything – like a memory trail or even a knowledge library.
My current opinion, although it could change, is that .. I don’t want my presence Aggregated, I want it Globally Available (read more here).