And Now...The Backlash

What a fickle group we new media consumers are. Twitter had been everyone’s new crack for the last year or so, then, twitter stumbles (and no, this has nothing to do with my last column about Twitter’s TOS) and all of a sudden a cry emanates from the throng for an alternative to twitter. Maybe it’s Jaiku (with its newly minted Google money), or perhaps Pownce, maybe its BrightKite, or FriendFeed, Tumblr, or any other number of alternatives. Read more...

Comments

[Daniel Andrlik]

Honestly? Twitter's had problems for a LONG time, and it has really been community good will that's been keeping it going. There's been rumblings about an "alternative to Twitter" for quite a while as well, but users HAVE been sticking it out hoping for Twitter "to get their ducks in a row." What's the community gained by doing that? Twitter's uptime and performance has actually gotten worse, not better. The reason why has already been discussed at length everywhere else, so I won't get into that here.

Consider though, if you had a desktop app that crashed as often as Twitter did, would you keep using it? I certainly wouldn't. What's going on here is not a sudden cry, it's just the A-Listers starting to pick up on and agree with the muttering that's been going on for a while.

Honestly, there is nothing magical about Twitter as a service. It's valuable to users because of the active community there. If that community all picked up and moved elsewhere, that service would be the new hotness, but social inertia keeps us using what's essentially a poorly designed and poorly implemented product.

All that being said, I haven't seen a compelling service to switch to yet, however unless Twitter resolves its issues soon it will absolutely lose its user base to the next decent app that comes along.

[Greg Hollingsworth]

Well, perhaps my own perception of the issue is a reflection of my own usage of Twitter. I use twitter every day, but it's not constant (as the occasional number of hours (or days) between tweets) would indicate.

Maybe it's not necessarily the A-listers picking up, but the non "power" users. You're right, Twitter's downtime has been trending upward every month for the last year and a half, and yes, I think people have been very loyal thus far, but they are loyal precisely for the reason you state, at this point, there isn't anything better out there.

I wasn't trying to intimate that there never would be, just that there isn't at present. Like any service or product, once something better comes along you either keep up or close down.