End of the Twitterless Week: Experiences and Reflections
It’s been one week - to the hour - since the start of my “Twitterless Week Experiment” and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned that there are at least two powerful competitors in the microblogging realm - Jaiku and Pownce - either of which would be a very deserving recipient of Twitter’s teetering crown.
Both services are so solid in fact that I am hard pressed to decide between the two as to which is best. Each offers its own strengths and capabilities. Jaiku is very Twitter like, with the added bonus of threaded commenting and a groups tool. Pownce carries an incredible natively developed AIR application and phenomenal functionality offerings - including threaded commenting as well as the opportunity share massive files of up to 100 MB’s or 250 MB’s for paid accounts.
In terms of functionality and usability, both Jaiku and Pownce leave Twitter in the dust. However I’ve discovered that Twitter has something that neither of these two communities do, and which is singlehandedly responsible for powering its dominance over the market: users.
More than anything else, this last week has taught me that the value of Twitter has nothing to do with the service - there is a ridiculous amount to be desired there, and frankly Twitter should be ashamed of itself in that respect. No, the value of Twitter is in the user community that surrounds it.
The experiences I take from my evaluation of both Jaiku and Pownce were exactly the same. In both cases I spent the first two days exploring the tool suite and available functionality, feeling extremely satisfied and optimistic all the while. Then I would begin to seek out like-minded users only to discover there were not many to be found.
Let’s be clear about this though. There are definitely users to be found at both Jaiku and Pownce, however the magnitude of the overall population is orders less than Twitter, and the amount of usage seems equally smaller.
Basically I’ve found two fantastic alternatives to Twitter - both of which I would quite happily switch to - but very few users. It was like moving from an active, bustling metropolis plagued by dilapidated and decaying infrastructure and pathetic governance, and moving to a brand-new town with few residents.
It’s not the buildings that make the town, it’s the people. Likewise, without users a social network is neither social, nor a network - it’s just a web application left wanting for a voice.
So ultimately I will opt to remain with Twitter - for now. I have no loyalties for the application whatsoever; what I do have though is a tremendous desire to remain a part of my network. In the end the thought of losing my network on Twitter is far, far worse than the notion of having to deal with the unreliability of the framework that supports it.
Saturday, June 14th, 2008