Twitter is dying and what to do about it.

Twitter is dying. There were two significant news stories and a few anecdotal stories that convince me Twitter is dying. First, Twitter suffered a denial of service attack that shut it down for several hours. It just has not seemed to recover. To this day I still see complaints of sluggishness, lost tweets, or accounts that crashed. Second, Facebook purchased FriendFeed. Personally, I haven't dived deeply into the story to fully digest the ramifications, but at first blush I think it's Facebook's competitive answer to Twitter. I have also noticed recently more subscribers to my FriendFeed account, even though I hardly ever use it (that may change). Here are my reasons why Twitter is failing:

Twitter is not scalabe - the recent denial of service attack convinced me that Twitter is not scalable. There are now numerous calls on the web for a distributed network. "Twitter is run by a single company in a single office building in San Francisco... But for Twitter, centralization is also a curse... [It is] too popular for one company to handle." (Slate.com)  

Twitter is a first mover innovator - Historically, fast followers often beat the first mover innovators. For example, Google was preceded by AltaVista and iTunes by Napster. Google was not the first search engine, it was just a better search engine. Twitter is the first microblog, but I believe there will emerge a better microblog.

Twitter is inundated with spam - I get so many spam followers that I've pretty much stopped checking my new followers. I don't follow everyone who follows me and it's a shame that I may be missing out on some cool new tweeps because I just don't have the time to filter out the crap. I also get tired of auto-DMs and "How can I help your business" DMs. And the number of "1000 FREE follower TODAY", "whiten your teeth", blah, blah, blah is incredibly annoying.

Twitter has an identity crisis - Recently I read co-founder Evan Williams stated that Twitter is a messaging service. Then I read that co-founder Biz Stone "said instead of thinking of the service as a social tool to connect with friends, he wants Twitter to be seen as a communications and information network for discovering and sharing what is happening right now." Without a vision, Twitter will perish. It will continue roll out tools that people don't want like retweeting, and neglect useful features like groups, filtering, and better web interface.

The value is in the apps - Like thousands of others, I have paid for Twitter. I've bought three iPhone apps (Tweetie, Twittelator, and Twitterfon), but Twitter has failed to profit from these sales. The best thing Twitter has done was open up it's API. This allowed developers to write tons of apps and foster growth. The value of Twitter is in clients like PeopleBrowser, HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Seesmic.

I agree with Slate.com that microblogging is here to stay and is too important for one company. So what should can we, as consumers, do?

Keep a watch out for the next big thing. Better yet, be the next big thing. Early in my Twitter experience a lot of my followers went to Plurk. Most of them came back. Then there was Identic.ca. It proved to me that people are loyal to mircroblogging, but not a specific brand. Twitter is just a brand. Unfortunately it's brand is tarnished from fail whale, lack of revenue, and being in kahoots with the CNN / Ashton Kutcher PR stunt. Furthermore, too many people have too much trouble answer the question, What is Twitter. 

Backup up your network. My goal for Twitter was, and is, simple: build a business network. I have spent a lot of time building a network of CFOs, CEOs, small business leaders, tech, marketing, and social media gurus. This network has been hugely beneficial to me both professional and personally. Twitter has lost followers/following and tweets before and I have to anticipate that happening again. I've used Tweetake and Twistory, but really like the concept of Lifestreambackup.com. It's automatic and includes all your social networks (Flickr, Zoho & Google docs, Gmail, and more).

Posted via email from Mike Campbell's posterous