
Dave Winer:  "Twitter is a ghost town" - timr
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/06/06/planB.html
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SwellJoe
So, the interesting thing, to me, is that a few weeks ago everyone was
discussing the axing of Blaine Cook from the Twitter team for his "failure to
scale". Turns out, nobody else in the company can scale Twitter or keep it
online reliably, either. Huh. Must be a hard problem. It's probably a good
time for folks to apologize to Blaine for piling all the blame on one guy for
a problem that, in reality, took the whole development team to create and will
take the whole development team to solve. (And it's time for everyone to stop
pretending scaling can be solved by one magic bullet or another...if you don't
build, or rebuild, to scale, you won't scale.)

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mechanical_fish
Here's an off-the-cuff prediction: Twitter itself, as well as the Twitter
community, will be just fine. In a year or two nobody will remember these
problems.

Twitter may have scaling problems, but it's not as if their potential
competitors are magically immune to those. Meanwhile, Twitter holds a _huge_
marketing advantage -- you can't say "Site X is just like Twitter" without
saying "Twitter" -- and a big Metcalfe's Law advantage: Everyone who is
remotely interested in Twitter-like sites already has a Twitter account, and
those accounts won't magically disappear. Meanwhile, there will be more than
one Twitter competitor, all desperately trying to distinguish themselves from
each other as well as from the original.

Sooner or later Company X will figure out how to scale Twitter. At which point
either Company X buys Twitter for the name and the userbase, Twitter buys
Company X for the technology, or Google buys everybody. Or, Twitter eventually
reverse-engineers the superior architecture, at which point they will beat
Company X over the head with superior name recognition and larger userbase.
This is _especially_ true if Company X is actually the open-source community
-- if some random Python programmer manages to create a superior, open-source
Twitter architecture, Twitter will just install it on a server farm within a
month and be right back in the game. The open-source movement has a lot of
brilliant techies, but I doubt that its marketing team can outrace Twitter's
from a standing start.

The Twitter concept has enough mindshare that I doubt it can just evaporate.
They're not being sued out of existence like Napster. I'm not convinced that a
scalable Twitter is _physically impossible_. So I would suggest that rumors of
its death are greatly exaggerated. It's just... resting.

~~~
swombat
Agreed. I signed up to Pwnce right after I signed up to Twitter, but quickly
decided I couldn't be bothered with Pwnce since Twitter was clearly fine and
had more users.

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swombat
Twitter is very active from where I'm standing.

~~~
boomshine
Agreed.

The strange thing is that yours is the only comment here that responds
directly to Winer's statement about a ghost town.

Is anyone else wondering what the hell Winer is talking about?

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metajack
I started using twitter a lot more right before blaine left. Now I barely use
it because the IM integration is gone. Hopefully someone will move forward to
implement the distributed twitter on top of XMPP and Pubsub. There is already
a tentative little XEP:
<http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/microblogging.html>

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unalone
This is a wild guess, but from what I've seen Tumblr is picking up a lot of
momentum. It's started to attract a pretty smart community and it's building
steam. I don't know if it's a REPLACEMENT for Twitter, but it serves the same
purpose but without the downtime.

~~~
nilobject
I've jumped on Plurk, and I like it a lot.

~~~
unalone
I just heard about Plurk. Funny. Looks like it's a new thing. I don't think
it's going to last. Its problem is that it adds on complex, unneeded features
to a simple idea.

That's what made Twitter so huge: its astounding simplicity. It lost points
for being TOO simple and for having downtime, but that's what made it huge.
Tumblr has that feel to it: that feeling that it's as simple as it can get,
with a few exceptions. It's an exhilarating feeling.

Plurk doesn't have that. It feels to me like Twitter with clutter.

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Mystalic
The magic simply has vanished. Twitter just isn't as....fun anymore. It's kind
of like the eerie silence you have when you've been informed someone you know
has passed away.

