

Twitter: The beginning of the end? - amrith
http://hypecycles.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/twitter-beginning-of-the-end/

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jeremymcanally
Uh, sending a C&D to a shady application that uses their trademark in its name
doesn't really spell "alienating their developer community." They are one of
the most engaging API providers I've ever seen; they actually talk to people
via their Twitter account, engage developers via the mailing list, etc.

And doesn't this joker think people have created Twitter clones? Identi.ca,
FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. None of these have succeeded because they are in
some degree crappier than Twitter. Plus, users matter. Why use something
similar to Twitter if no one cares and there's no one to follow?

Ridiculous linkbait.

~~~
axod
>> "FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. None of these have succeeded"

Umm. Sorry? Come again? None of these have succeeded? By exactly which metric
are you measuring success here?

Please explain exactly how twitter is even as successful as friendfeed let
alone facebook.

edit: -1 points for questioning how you're measuring friendfeed and facebook
as failures? My how times have changed.

~~~
ErrantX
Facebook and Friendfeed's public realtime stuff hasn't been a massive "viral"
success in quite the same way as Twitter has been.

~~~
poppysan
Wow, what a horrible response. Sometimes its better to admit you are wrong,
and didn't mean Facebook and FriendFeed. By ANY measurements (viral success or
otherwise) Facebook is more successful than twitter.

~~~
ErrantX
huh? I never said it in the first place :) how could I admit to being wrong?

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mechanical_fish
_In my opinion, all it takes now, is the creation of a small number of killer-
apps on clones platform to cement the fate of Twitter._

People have been saying this about Twitter since it only had ten users. It was
a bit more believable back when Twitter was all-Fail Whale, all the time.

Now it just looks like a joke. If you want to predict that Twitter will suffer
from competition you must at least _name_ the competition. I see that you kept
your list of names safely behind a link. That was a good choice, because the
list makes the joke even funnier. ( _Skittr_? _Yonkly_? _Kwippy_? Were these
auto-generated? Has anyone actually heard of any of these things? My favorite
example is the mighty "Dukudu" empire: "auctioned off on eBay, acquired by
allesklar.de for EUR 43,208". Ooh, a whole EUR 43k! I'm sure the guys on Sand
Hill Road are trembling with fear.)

(Not that I begrudge these projects their marketshare. I'm sure they're being
run by fine people. I have a funny idea for a microblogging site myself, and I
might even launch it with a hilariously silly name. But I'll try to resist the
urge to have delusions of grandeur.)

Incidentally, how can a business simultaneously have no business model _and_
be mortally threatened by a patent infringement suit? If the patent troll wins
and is awarded a 12% royalty, do they have to accept 12% of the losses? ;)

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swombat
This headline is over-inflamatory, and the article is pretty far off the mark.

Twitter is very good to developers. The only cases where there are
altercations are when people use the word "Twitter" in their service's name.
That's defending their trademark - something all companies need to do if they
want to keep those trademarks.

Twitter's not headed for big trouble at all - or at least, that trouble will
have nothing to do with the problems mentioned in the article. The main
trouble on Twitter's road, imho, is the big battle they're having with
Facebook. There'll probably only be one winner in that one.

~~~
axod
I agree... I think the problem for them is that morphing facebook into twitter
is simple - you remove features and privacy settings. Morphing twitter into
facebook however, is far harder and much more work. You have to build all the
tons of features facebook have.

I'd be really surprised if Twitter win it out, facebook just look ridiculously
clued in to how to beat them, whereas I haven't really seen any changes at
twitter in terms of features. Have they added any? :/ Strike that... have they
added back in the features they removed?

edit: yeah downmod me all you like... _or_ you could reply with a coherent
argument.

~~~
tonystubblebine
I think defining easy and hard for these two sites solely in terms of software
development costs is too narrow. It would be extremely hard for Facebook to
remove features from a customer relations standpoint. Likewise, it would
actually be pretty easy for Twitter to add a feature like photos into the
existing feature set without alienating their users.

I think also that this idea that Twitter and Facebook are in a head to head
battle is mostly media generated. Twitter's strength is its public nature, and
Facebook's is its private nature. To say that one will beat the other is to
say that either there is no need for private conversation or no need for
public.

~~~
axod
Facebook has already moved toward twitter, and has gained users because of it.
They can easily make it easy for people to use the service like they would
twitter, whilst making it clear that posts will be public etc. No issues with
PR there.

If you look back at the last year or so, facebook has moved massively... Yes
Twitter _could_ add all the features, and remove things like the 140 char
limit, but they don't seem to have moved all that much in the same time.
Facebook clearly has the momentum and opportunity.

I do think the battle is pretty real, I don't want to go to 2 sites to share
stuff, I just want one. And I can - I just post stuff to facebook, and say
[Family] or [Friends] or [everyone]. It's pretty much already there.

~~~
tonystubblebine
In social software there's a big and important gap between the possibility of
a social behavior and the existence of that social behavior. In this case,
your theory (shared by TechCrunch apparently) seems to be that Facebook, which
has proved that there is an enormous market for private social communication,
is going to develop a massive volume of public postings, public discussion,
and become a destination site for following public discussion.

Here's my theory: no way.

\- Defaults rule. If the facebook default is for private than that will be the
bulk of conversation and that will set the expectation about how to respond
(i.e. it limits forwarding of good posts to strangers).

\- Both sites benefit from being simple and easy to use. For Facebook to
suddenly imbue every activity (posting, reading, and finding friends) with an
understanding of access controls would make it a much more complex site to
understand.

Facebook may be copying features, but I don't think it has a chance of
becoming the primary tool for public asynchronous messaging any more than it
has of becoming the primary blogging platform or primary email platform.

Twitter, is not copying Facebook features because those features don't support
its goal for public discourse. Instead they are developing deep contacts with
media.

In the end, Facebook may end up with more users than Twitter, but that's an
indication of the size of the markets not of one company beating the other.

Both sites grew last month by the way, so it does seem like talking about the
demise of either one is backward. Twitter's 6% monthly growth rate compounds
to more than 100% per year (if only my investments would do that).

------
TrevorJ
"Twitter has exactly two things going for it:

    
    
        * the number of registered users on Twitter and the network between those users,"
    

That's not exactly accurate. There's a _reason_ Twitter has users. You don't
attract all those users in the first place without some kind of feature people
want.

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tonystubblebine
My significant other, who wrote The Twitter Book and so gets asked these sorts
of questions a lot, has a pretty effective answer. Twitter as a business may
stay or die, but Twitter as a type of communication (short, public
asynchronous messaging) has proven popular and is here to stay.

~~~
TweedHeads
"(short, public asynchronous messaging) has proven popular and is here to
stay."

Exactly my thoughts. There is a real need for that, just add "distributed" to
the equation, where nobody controls the ecosystem.

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jknupp
The comments about alienating the development community aside, the post just
seems to be the constantly rehashed "it has no revenue model, thus it will
fail," argument. I don't necessarily disagree, but I certainly don't think
this blog post adds anything to the conversation.

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chrischen
If anyone releases a killer feature then Twitter can just match it. But then
again it may not all be about how many features an app has but the quality of
features.

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abdulhaq
This is the beginning of the beginning of the end of twitter stories. This is
the end of my reading beginning of the end of twitter stories.

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LostInTheWoods
The real twitter killer will be the proliferation of smartphones. Who needs
SMS when you have HTTP?

~~~
callahad
Proflieration of HTTP-capable smartphones will only help twitter, not kill it.

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TweedHeads
Twitter will never be killed, the same way Wordpress will never be killed.
Right now twitter has an advantage that will reduce over time as more and more
blogging services embrace micro blogging and define a way to share in real
time their content with their subscribers from other providers.

If I were google I'd be revamping jaiku with a cooler name and start pushing
distributed microbbloging as the new platform (perhaps joining it with
blogger). The same for Wordpress and other blogging platforms.

Twitter will adapt or die. But will no longer have the strict control over the
ecosystem it has today.

