[Cathartic post] On Twitter issues

Posted 2 years, 2 months ago at 6:53 pm. 4 comments

No other online service out there epitomizes the “Can’t live with it, can’t live without it” sentiment more than Twitter. Considering the amount of downtime Twitter has had recently, its impressive to see Twitter managing to keep as much of its user base as it has (I remain a Twitter addict, you can follow me here). Although that may be changing. A sneak peek into Alexa’s traffic graph for Twitter for the last 6 months reveals a profile that isn’t something the team at Twitter can be too happy about.

But I dont judge the team at Twitter too harshly. For one thing, Twitter was not so much imagined as a conversation engine as a status update app. There is a reason why XMPP or a similar lower level push based protocol is preferred for chat systems than HTTP. If you have a lot of conversations going on, its better that the server pushes them to you than a periodically refreshing HTTP pull. The XMPP based architecture is outlined a little more in this Techcrunch post.

But still, most users have invested a considerable time building a social network on Twitter and we would like to see it work. Maybe they should consider leveraging Google App Engine or Amazon Web Services to deal with the scale issue (although I can imagine that getting expensive and Twitter doesn’t yet have a business model). And with services like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed trying to take over the conversation part of Twitter (and other online services), Twitter really needs to get its act together. More than a couple of blogs are now talking about how Twitter’s most recent outage (planned or otherwise) did not stop the conversation with FriendFeed picking up where Twitter left off.

However even these seem, at least to me, threats aimed to have Twitter work better rather than an actual statement of an intent to abandon it. Considering FriendFeed is barely off the ground and has an interaction paradigm very different from Twitter (I go to it a couple of times a day as opposed to Twitter which I have up pretty much all the time thanks to Twhirl ), I am not betting on that yet.

Twitter_vs_FriendFeed.png

Twitter seems to embody a fundamental concept of Web 2.0: The social network is the content. And migrating that content is hard. But given enough reason, it can be migrated.

Ah, well, at least they have interesting service is down screens:

[Update]

Related links:
My Twitter links on del.icio.us
Read Write Web: Twitter has culture
Peter Elst: Quest for the perfect Twitter client

4 Replies

  1. Ross Jul 1st 2008

    Could it be? I get to leave the first comment on your new site? :)

    One thing to consider is Alexa itself. That huge drop in traffic is also right around the time that Alexa updated to its new and “more accurate” algorithm. Though I do actually think they’re a bit more accurate now, in terms of traffic estimations etc, I still don’t take Alexa stats very seriously.

  2. Ross Jul 1st 2008

    Update: oops. looks like this isn’t the first post, nor was my comment the first one. doh.

  3. arpit Jul 2nd 2008

    Hey Ross,
    Ah you may not be the first, how about the first Canadian :P ?
    Good point on the Alexa algorithm change time-frame being the same as the drop point on the graph but even then as time goes on, you would hope to see the trend going up not down.
    I use Alexa with a pinch of salt, still good for looking at trends though.

  4. Kristof Elst Jul 3rd 2008

    I actually believe that cat with a screwdriver fixing Twitter thing ;)


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