Twitter, worth a billion? nothing? too late? no, no & no.
I try not to add too much to the twitter whinging (was that too british of me?), but I thought I’d give this a roll. It all pretty much confirms my generalized notion that there is no middle ground on the web.
The Beginning
Let’s start from the beginning, first there was the post that suggested how Twitter could be worth a billion in a year. I read that post in Reader and thought it was interesting, but ultimately, irrelevant. Twitter is going to be working on its scaling issues for the next several months at least - it isn’t doing anything new in a year. Ultimately it would be interesting to see a mobile payment system, but I’d guess they’d team up with Amazon or Google or PayPal to make that happen rather than do it themselves, it’d also remain to be seen if there was a strong desire to SMS people money and what the security implications of that would be.
The Backlash
However, the web elite took strong exception to this, because everyone knows that Twitter is over. Everyone’s moving to FriendFeed, or Plurk, or whatever. Twitter’s down messages on FriendFeed are replete with how over that service is and how FF is going to take over. Take a look at this article on CNet discussing how Twitter could be worth nothing in a year. Here he talks about how everyone’s moving to FriendFeed, how people are beginning to “see the light” and realizing how being down nearly 2% of the time (nearly 6 days out of the year!!) is too much to bear in the pursuit of letting people know what you’re eating for lunch. (ok, I kid, there’s more interesting stuff happening, but really…).
Then take a look at the author’s Twitter profile and his FriendFeed one. He’s got well over 1000 peoples on Twitter. On FriendFeed? 2. Granted you only see who he’s subscribed to, but seeing as how his ratio on Twitter is pretty close to 1:1, his overflowing inbox of FF subs means it either isn’t so overflowing or he doesn’t care about FF at all. Look, even Scoble, a major FF proponent and someone who my empirical observation is subscribed to by almost everyone on FF has only 3000 subscriptions, compared to close to 30,000 on twitter. And I’d bet you no shortage of money that the percentage of people who subscribe to him on FF is significantly greater than his share of Twitterers.
Another post from a really excellent blog (except for this particular post) says that Twitter has two more weeks before it reaches the point of no return. Two more weeks! In the world of people who use these services, no one, but no one knows about FriendFeed. Don’t get me wrong, I love FF, but really, ask your friends this. What’s email? What’s IM? What’s Facebook? What’s Twitter? What’s FriendFeed? What’s Plurk? Ask them that series of questions and see what happens. Right around Twitter you’ll notice an exponential fall off.
Twitter isn’t going anywhere
Only to the .1% of the online world who twitters a ton and have several hundreds if not thousands of followers does this downtime actually mean anything. For everyone else, if they even notice the downtime, they don’t think much of it. Just like how they live with their computers crashing all the time. It’s just one of those things that you deal with. And that .1% isn’t going to leave twitter if their thousands of followers don’t go with them. Look at the folks who say they are going to leave, at best they go to FriendFeed and then route all their followers through FF so they don’t miss anything. So what?
Twitter just brought in two big investors, not least of which is Bezos you might have heard of his website, Amazon.com? Yeah, turns out he probably knows some people who might know how one might scale up a website. I’m not sure about that, it’s just an inkling I’ve got. If I had cash and was awesome web guy, I wish I could have invested - this is the perfect time. The market has totally overshot the problem and Twitter’s got way more negative publicity than it warrants - Bezos probably got in for a steal and a year or two from now will rake in the profits. Or, you know, the sort of profits that Web2.0 sites don’t actually ever make till they do something like IPO or get bought.
The competitors
In the meantime, the competitors are lining up trying to grab as much share of angry first adopters as they can. Jaiku, Plurk and most newest comer Identi.ca. I joined a few of these just to see what all the hubbub was about.
Jaiku looks ok, but is in private beta and while it seems to be withering on the vine, murmurs of some magical google sauce can be heard through the leaves. Eh. (me on jaiku)
Plurk is, I believe, too annoying and contrived to do well with the slightly later adopters. It’s grown quickly, but that’s easy from a small base. I’d guess with its quirky interface and cute art it may get a niche, but won’t ever be that big. (me on plurk)
Identi.ca is the newest and in some ways most interesting competitor. It’s a twitter clone with two interesting features, one it’s free (yay GPLv3) and two it seems to be built with the idea that it will be a federated/decentralized service. So the load will be spread out everywhere and a server going down doesn’t affect everyone. It remains to be seen how well that works in real life and how resistant it is to failure and malicious intent. (me on identi.ca)
I’d guess these probably at best settle into some niche of users that sustains them. None of them come within even an order of magnitude of Twitter’s subscriber base in the foreseeable future. Twitter’s got an easy monopoly and it’ll take much worse than a 2% downtime to affect that. To sum up, Twitter’s not going to be worth a billion in a year. Twitter’s also not going to be gone in a year. Twitter will be doing just fine in a year and none of these competitors are going to be anywhere close to it. I’m just saying, where do you fall on this? Do you even use twitter and/or any competitors?
