It's somewhat incomprehensible that Twitter has been unable to keep the service up and running. More than 10 years into the age of the Internet, with a huge amount of R&D publicly available about scaling Web applications, you would think that Twitter's engineers could figure it out.
A recent blog post from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said help is on the way in the form of about $15 million in funding:
Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model. However, our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust. Private funding gives us the runway we need to stay focused on the infrastructure that will help our business take flight. We will continue hiring systems engineers, operators, and architects, as well as consultants, scientists, and other professionals to help us realize our vision.
But the natives who love Twitter are getting restless, and they're losing faith. Twitter is chronically up and down, and key features, such as track and replies, disappear as company engineers try to save their patient from flatlining.
The father of RSS Dave Winer recently said, "Twitter, as it was conceived, was never meant to live."
"It's very possible with better engineering its architecture might have gone on for a few more years, but eventually it would have hit this wall, where there were too many people posting too many twits to too many followers. The scale of the system as conceived rises exponentially."
Check out Winer's Twitter "spewage" report to get an idea of Twitter's scaling challenge.
Allen Stern of CenterNetworks likes Twitter's simplicity and is willing to bet that Twitter can be stabilized.
"I don't believe Twitter is going to die, be killed or go for a suicide. Twitter is easy to understand and use. It's perfect for the mainstream. FriendFeed isn't. FriendFeed will do very well also for the set of users currently using it. I am not sold that there's mainstream appeal coming for FriendFeed."
The weekend conversation is pivoting on whether FriendFeed will replace Twitter as the new conversation hub among the digerati. Winer, who has a high authority rank on this topic, doesn't think that FriendFeed is the answer.
... before we all move to FriendFeed and think we've solved anything, this underscores the problem with putting all our eggs in one basket. We just move the problem into the future. FriendFeed may be able to scale where Twitter can't, but there are other problems with centralization, putting all your trust in a corporation, esp. one so young and unformed. Instead, we should start bootstrapping a decentralized Twitter-like thing immediately, building off the base of clients that connect to Twitter. It can connect to any service we want to connect to, and if one should go away, we do the thing the Internet does so well, route around the outage. I wrote about this, extensively, in early May.
As Winer predicts, Twitter, as a concept, is not going to die. An open platform for microblogging and broadcasting with followers has clearly taken hold. Just as instant messaging spawned numerous silos and a kind of standard in XMPP, Twitter's twist on messaging will go through an evolution that eventually leads to a common standard and stable infrastructure. The Twitter concept has been cloned (Pownce and Plurk), and it won't be long before Facebook, MySpace, or other big players figure out how to make following, followers, tracking, and summizing part of their services.
See also:
Steve Gillmor: Saving the FailWhale
TechCrunch: Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed
FriendFeed and Twitter: Let it Be
Former Googler and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor in this video offers his views on Twitter and describes the new summarization feature coming to FriendFeed soon. Taylor said he was not interested in cloning Twitter, but in improving FriendFeed's communications tools. The next major FriendFeed improvement is an algorithm that processes signals from inputs, such as comments and "likes," to surface the best-shared items from a user's set of friends.
See also:
Gillmor Gang: Inside FriendFeed
Jeremiah Owyang: What FriendFeed's Micromeme means to you, brands and the Web
The Friday Gillmor Gang podcast featured special guests Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, the creators of FriendFeed. Along with Twitter, FriendFeed has become a poster child for the next wave of communications tools favored by the cybernauts.
Steve Gillmor seems to think that Twitter will become the predominant messaging backbone for the social Web. If the company behind Twitter can't make it happen, Gillmor suggested that FriendFeed should do it.
Buchheit, who was employee No. 23 at Google and suggested the now famous "Don't be evil" motto, said that FriendFeed wasn't designed to kill Twitter. "It's about making services you already use more useful," he said. "We think of FriendFeed not so much about displacing services, but about making them more useful."
He characterized FriendFeed as a content discovery tool, allowing users to view content through the eyes of the people they know. FriendFeed also allows for comments and has "Rooms" for groups of people to gather, as well as application programming interfaces that expose all the data in the system. Twitter is more of a messaging service.
Taylor said he created FriendFeed because what he defined as the nucleus of his online activity was different from that of other friends. "Over the past five years with the proliferation of syndication and APIs, the data isn't necessarily siloed."
Gillmor tried to make the case that most people don't use a lot of services. Buchheit agreed that most people use one service, but added that not everyone uses the same service. "Part of what makes FriendFeed so powerful is that we all use different services, such as Google Picassa, Flickr or SmugMug (for photos). You can see them all even though users are using separate services," he said.
Gillmor and Robert Scoble recommended that FriendFeed support XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol--an XML technology for real-time communication), which would give it Twitter-like capabilities. "We want to pull in data and make it available anywhere, such as in iGoogle gadget, Facebook, and RSS feeds. Adding XMPP would fit in logically," Buchheit said.
The FriendFeeders said they plan to add a blocking feature. "We are adding features as users request them," Buchheit said. "We have been thinking about the right way to implement blocking for FriendFeed and it's a bit more complex (than Twitter blocking)." Nor does FriendFeed have the track feature of Twitter (which has been disabled of late), but it has search, which Buchheit said provides equivalent functionality.
FriendFeed's developers are also working on improving the user interface, which suffers from information overload. Buchheit said they are testing summarization of the best content from a period of time, so users don't have to sift through to find the best stuff, and combining items that are duplicated or related.
They also maintain that the fragmentation of conversation by having separate comments for each entry is one of the best features. Users don't necessarily want to participate in aggregated public forums, preferring to converse within the social groups they care about. For example, you might not want to combine co-workers comments with your mother's comments, Buchheit said.
The obsession with the ups and downs of Twitter among my friends has generated a great deal of bloviation, including my own. On a slow news weekend, Twitter's performance problems are fodder for a bit of theater and for getting some daily keyboard exercise.
The image below is meant to bring some perspective to the Twittersphere. On one hand, Twitter navel gazing (or any other navel gazing) is a waste of resources in the context of what is going on in the world. On the other hand, Twitter and its brethren are becoming viable communications vehicles for spreading the "word" and images.
For example, I first learned of the recent tragic earthquake in China via Twitter messages from people I follow on the service. To be clear, Twitter is not the Holy Grail of communications services--it's an extension of instant messaging and technologies such as RSS. Nor are the 140 characters in a Twitter message a substitute for a blog post or news article. But a "tweet" can be a network amplifier, providing a brief snapshot, innervated by followers and the followed, that can be broadcast around the world in near real time.
Twitter and related services are currently noisy, spammy, unwieldy, overrated, and often unreliable. But over time, the core concepts will become an integral part of the Internet's communications fabric.
Lately the echo chamber of the blogosphere inhabited by the Gillmor Gang (of which I am a member) has been caught in a loop of Twitter-FriendFeed convulsions.
Steve Gillmor believes that Twitter is the communications medium of the future. Send out a message to your followers and track (when the feature is enabled) the loosely coupled conversation as it wafts deeper into the cloud. FriendFeed, on the other hand, aggregates feeds from Twitter and many other sources, creating an index of the content (gestures in Gillmorspeak) an individual chooses to share with followers.
Twitter's friendly API allows applications to be built on top of it (when the site is up), letting FriendFeed and other services tap into the Twitter stream. In addition, FriendFeed allows users to comment on the contents of the aggregated feeds and has "rooms" for discussions among a group of people.
Steve Gillmor makes the claim that Twitter is being strangled by FriendFeed and that his pal Robert Scoble is hijacking the conversation away from the unreliable Twitter site to FriendFeed. It's much ado about nothing. Users have the freedom to head to their communications medium of choice. The Twitter conversation stream isn't locked into a walled garden--tweets can flow like water into applications such as FriendFeed, Summize, and Facebook.
It's not clear precisely where this latest twist on instant messaging and feed aggregation is heading, but just let it evolve without the prejudice in its own Darwinian way. That doesn't mean to back away from criticism or debate, but to do so in the context of open networks that provide ways for individual users and groups to shape their online experience.
Steve Gillmor prefers the Twitter funnel, while Robert Scoble likes the FriendFeed blender, which can include Twitter streams.
Twitter and tweeting are rapidly becoming part of the lexicon, at least among the digerati who have discovered the jouissance of followers and following. Twitter hasn't unleashed a unique technology, but an inspired broadcast pivot on existing messaging models. As the generation that has grown up texting rather than e-mailing takes over the planet, Twitter and its ilk will go mainstream.
With Twitter, you have followers (those who subscribe to your 140-character-limited tweets) and following (those whose tweets you follow). As you can see from the graphic below, Twitter usage comes in all shapes and sizes.
At the top end of the scale, TWiT.tv's Leo Laporte has the most followers to date, with 32,728 (see Twitterholic for the top Twitterers list), followed by Barack Obama. You'll note that the digitally savvy Obama (the Obama camp, not the candidate himself) follows practically every follower it has, whereas Leo follows on 427 Twitterers.
The Obama camp is definitely not prolific--only 119 tweets to date to thrill and inform its more than 32,000 followers. Leo is more generous with 895 tweets, but the most energetic and prolific man of Twitter is Robert Scoble.
He follows almost as many people as those who follow him, and has showered his fans with more than 12,000 tweets to date. On Saturday, he scribed 103 tweets to his more than 20,000 followers.
Paying attention to the daily tweets of 20,000 to 30,000 people, even at a maximum of 140-characters per pop, isn't remotely possible unless you spend your entire day and night in the Twittersphere.
As with Facebook, you can collect thousands of friends and followers but only a small portion will matter. Leo's ratio of followers to following--32,728 to 427--is a more realistic and practical approach to using Twitter.
Search and filtering applications for Twitter help to reduce the Twitter overflow. FriendFeed and Alert Thingy (a desktop app for FriendFeed) vacuum up Twitter, Flickr and other feeds into a single, uber stream. Summize tracks Twitter conversations in real time.
Others are taking the Twitter concept into new areas. Seesmic has created a video equivalent of Twitter, and Pownce extends the Twitter model to file transfer and possibly music trading.
As a communications medium, Twitter is a self-promotional mechanism, as in the Twitter feed of CNET News headlines, as well as a vehicle for people to share random and often useless data, such as what you had for breakfast. Twitter can get noisy, but essentially it's an efficient broadcast and sharing conduit. For example, I first learned about the recent earthquake in China and ongoing developments from my Twitter stream.
Twitter is a complement, not a substitute, to blogging (also called "writing"). With its roots in SMS and instant messaging, the 140-character limit forces thought economy, saying more with less.
It's also having a side impact on blogging, implicitly training writers to write more succinctly, conserving bits even though they are in near infinite supply. A person's time and attention don't have infinite supply--getting to the point without rambling is a plus in our data-rich and continuously partial attention world.
One of the potential downsides of Twitter and other short-burst messaging apps is that context can be lost or it is very loosely coupled, which makes connecting the dots more difficult. On the other hand, if you consume a big enough supply, and the most salient, bite-size chunks of data, the bigger picture will come into focus.
The reality is that humans in the early 21st century will be required to process and buffer more discrete, loosely coupled bits of data than in the past of human history. Over the next few decades, more intelligence will seep into the network, filtering the overflowing stream for each of the 7 billion or 8 billion inhabitants of the planet and shaping more meaningful connections.
See also: What Twitter brings to the party
The Web spirit of "build an audience and figure out the business model later" is a great filter. It allows products and services into the wild without barriers or the need to sell advertisers on an unproven concept.
Those who can build an audience, such as Twitter and FriendFeed, and before them Google, Facebook, and dozens of others who turned into giants, have the scale to develop monetization schemes that a loyal and fanatic user base won't summarily reject.
In the case of Twitter, the service is a hit, attracting millions of "tweeters," many of whom won't appreciate ads slipped into their Twitter stream.
Here's a solution. How about paying for what you like to use. Much of what gets sent via Twitter is a form of self-advertising. If you like Twitter so much, how about paying $5 a month for the privilege. Of course, the fee would have to include a quality of service guarantee and rebates for downtime. And, you would expect the owners of the Twitter or other services to be priced transparently and competitively, or at least reasonably if no serious competition exists.
In fact, why aren't people willing to pay for what they use? Public radio has the same problem, hence the tedious pledge drives.
A mere $5. Around here, that's less than a day's worth of coffee, a bacon cheeseburger with fries, a lowly beer, and maybe soon a gallon of gas. And you would get unlimited "tweets" and the service doesn't go down, or at least it's up most of the time.
From its inception, the Web has been about free (not like beer) and mostly advertising-supported. You might you say, those $5-per-month fees could add up. You might be paying $25 per month for services you like to use, free of advertising or with ads. Then back off on the steak burritos, country omelets, beet salads, beers, or the bags of popcorn at the movie. The subscription model could work, despite its checkered history.
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