Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 by Jenn Lowther

Posted by Jenn Lowther

I have a confession to make. I <3 twitter. For those of you who don’t know what twitter is, it’s basically a micro blogging platform. You get 140 characters to say whatever you want. You add friends - creating your own social network and let them know what you are doing through your status updates. If you want to read more about twitter, you can find more info here.

The way I am currently interacting with twitter is reminiscent of when I first signed up for facebook - way back in February 2007. I am currently adding new friends, obsessively reading the different feeds, and checking out all of the new 3rd party applications that are starting to trickle out (Rebecca did a great post covering some of the twitter apps and clients). But, there are some major problems that I - and the twitter community in general - have been encountering, that just wasn’t there when facebook first opened up to the public.

The first - and most significantly - is the large amount of downtime. twitter doesn’t seem able to scale their service to deal with the recent large onslaught of users. Recently, it appears that twitter has hit a tipping point, it is no longer a fringe social networking site. The users have been fairly patient with twitter whilst they’ve been trying to sort this out. But lately, it has become much worse and fans (and users) of the site have started to get upset over this persistent issue. Today, Valleywag wrote an article titled ‘twitter outages inspire truly awful videos‘. twitter’s users, for the most part, are very tech and social media savvy and it appears that more than one user has decided to turn their displeasure into pretty funny and awful videos. Make sure you check out the singing guy - it’s funny. And the best thing about this is that when twitter decided to work, we twittered the video’s and article.

There is also a huge problem with signal to noise ratio on twitter, but you can deal with that by being selective about who you befriend on the site. I’ve noticed lately though that the signal is really starting to outweigh the noise from the users themselves, but that probably has more to do with being selective in who I add rather than an overall change in the signal to noise ratio. Also, there has recently been an onslaught of bots on the site automatically adding friends so that they can spam them. Real users have sorted out the initial signal to noise issues…and we are happy for that. But if this spam starts to become prevalent on the site, there will be some serious issues that they will have to sort out.

Finally - twitter thinks of itself as a communication tool rather than a social network. There has recently been a big uproar over twitter’s TOS and how they’ve dealt with harassment on the site. I’m not going to cover the whole situation, you can find great coverage of the issue here and Collen wrote a great open letter to twitter on how they need to deal with the issue. twitter needs to figure out who they are. The site is not just another IM client and the users I know don’t treat it as one. We are a community whether they like it or not. The only question is whether they are going to embrace this and encourage us or are they going to continue in the path that they’ve headed, alienating us and driving us to another site?

If twitter wants to become the next facebook - which in my opinion, they are poised to do - they need to address the issues outlined above. Like I said, I <3 twitter, but there are tons of alternatives out there for us to use - pownce, jaiku, plurk, just to name a few, so twitter need to get their act together so they don’t lose the early adopters - who are their biggest and most vocal advocates.

Tags: facebook, twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 4:13 pm and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.