Twitter’s starting to get my goat
Twitter has let users down yet again.
Steve Jobs is presently delivering his keynote speech at the MacWorld Conference. This is an extremely significant event for industry players. Most cannot make the conference and are forced to locate alternative means of following the news. Streaming video and live blogging, such as what Duncan Riley is doing at TechCrunch, provide a couple of options; however many are turning to Twitter because it’s arguably the fastest and most interactive of the lot.
In that sense Twitter has really begun to play a central role in significant events these days – not just for information consumers, but for deliverers as well. It provides an opportunity for staff working on major events to follow consumer/public opinion as it’s being formulated in the minds of the public. As such it provides some amazing insight.
This proved the case at the recent Iowa Caucus; some went so far as to say it even influenced the outcome. This may be just speculation though. (Will provide reference if I can find one).
However as of right now however, Twitter is unresponsive and no – or minimal – tweets are getting through. This has effectively crippled one of the key real-time modes of information dissemination and discussion and left countless users in the lurch.
The fact that Twitter continues to crash during times like this arises from nothing short of poor planning on the part of the company. Load and capacity planning is a fundamental consideration for providers of enterprise level services and the fact Twitter is not doing that is not only cause for a tremendous amount of frustration from end-users, but also concern about the staying power and future of the company.
Despite seeing a huge amount of discontent from users immediately following sudden unnannounced outages like the current one, users seem to flock back to Twitter with open arms once everything is fixed. I find this incredibly surprising in some ways. Yet due to the fact no other application has emerged to threaten Twitter’s position means there is no clear substitute. To a large degree this means user’s have no choice.
Jaiku for example, which was heralded as a Twitter killer, is looking as if it’s been left to die on the vine in the post-Google acquisition.
Pownce as well, despite all the initial hype, has not received the ongoing usage that was predicted.
So for the moment Twitter seems to still hold all the cards. Yet in the realm of constant ongoing innovation that is the web today, it’s only a matter of time before the next great thing comes along. And when this happens, if Twitter hasn’t gotten its act together I suspect we’ll see a mass exodus of unhappy users who have finally gotten sick of the unreliability of the tool and given up completely.
