It’s becoming almost a non-news item now to talk about yet another day that Twitter is down. It is getting a bit beyond painful for those of us that are great fans of the service, and it’s not going un-noted that they’re coming up on the one year anniversary of their big coming out at last years SXSW. Today, Allen Stern at CenterNetworks notes that they’re barely surviving the Future of Web Apps conference; it would seem that all hope is lost for them to attempt survival of this year’s SXSW.
Even Frederic at Last Podcast noted yesterday that there was a certain irony that “Dave Winer’s post on competing with Twitter just hit TechMeme while Twitter’s API backend seems to be down and out,” though I’m not sure at this point we can call it irony any longer. As much as Twitter is talked about and as often as it’s down, it isn’t coincidence that these two things occur in tandem. It is inevitablity.
There’s been a lot of talk of what the successor to Twitter is going to be. The runaway success of the service, despite it’s many foibles, has shown us that it is here to stay (at least in between the times that the server takes periodic naps). I suppose I’m just venting a bit of frustration here; they promised us with the hiring of their new VP of Operations Lee Mighdoll, that scalability would be priority number one, and we’d soon see an end to the problems. Meanwhile, I’ve been unable to sustain a good connection to Twitter for going on two days here.
I Use Twitter Less These Days
Twitter’s unreliability is what caused me to seek another solution for the liveblogging of the Digg Roundtable. Given the fact that it is Digg we’re talking about (a service that takes down servers with the best looking uptimes at whim), I had no idea what sort of volume to expect. All I knew is that I couldn’t trust Twitter to the task.
Similarly, I’ve found that I’m enjoying FriendFeed a whole lot more to meet new people and learn more about the attentions and interests of online friends of mine than I ever did with Twitter. Certainly, FriendFeed is not the same thing as Twitter, and lacks a lot of the mobile features and portability (as well as a bit of instantaneous ‘chat-like’ feel). None the less, I’m finding that I’m responding to folks Twitters more often in FriendFeed than I do on Twitter itself.
There’s a simple explanation for this. FriendFeed has been down once for about 15 minutes the whole time I’ve used it. Twitter is down constantly. It’s reliable. I know it’ll be there.
What Will Happen and What Can Twitter Do?
What’s going to happen, if Twitter doesn’t get it’s act together, is we’re going to see more and more services come out that pare down the unique abilities and features that Twitter offers, and repackage them and do them better - just like I’ve described. Twitter has created the need for folks to leave, and give more startups the opportunity to succeed in a lot of niches that Twitter currently fills.
It’s Twitter’s game to lose.
I’ve come up with a few solutions, which you can listen to here:
the company that over three quarters of the staff had been laid off following the resignations of the CTO and CEO Michael Raneri. MeeVee is a company 
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Will.I.Am is at it again, evangelizing Obama with another star-studded cast of Hollywood-types, 
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which the company acquired in mid-2007. Google’s goal with the new initiative is to give a phone contact to every homeless individual in the city that is willing to accept the offer.
