4 ms·

Twitter: The beginning of the end?

12 points by amrith 17y ago

mechanical_fish 17y ago
In my opinion, all it takes now, is the creation of a small number of killer-apps on clones platform to cement the fate of Twitter. People have been saying this about Twitter since it only had ten users. It was a bit more believable back when Twitter was all-Fail Whale, all the time. Now it just looks like a joke. If you want to predict that Twitter will suffer from competition you must at least name the competition. I see that you kept your list of names safely behind a link. That was a good choice, because the list makes the joke even funnier. (Skittr? Yonkly? Kwippy? Were these auto-generated? Has anyone actually heard of any of these things? My favorite example is the mighty "Dukudu" empire: "auctioned off on eBay, acquired by allesklar.de for EUR 43,208". Ooh, a whole EUR 43k! I'm sure the guys on Sand Hill Road are trembling with fear.) (Not that I begrudge these projects their marketshare. I'm sure they're being run by fine people. I have a funny idea for a microblogging site myself, and I might even launch it with a hilariously silly name. But I'll try to resist the urge to have delusions of grandeur.) Incidentally, how can a business simultaneously have no business model and be mortally threatened by a patent infringement suit? If the patent troll wins and is awarded a 12% royalty, do they have to accept 12% of the losses? ;)
jeremymcanally 17y ago
Uh, sending a C&D to a shady application that uses their trademark in its name doesn't really spell "alienating their developer community." They are one of the most engaging API providers I've ever seen; they actually talk to people via their Twitter account, engage developers via the mailing list, etc. And doesn't this joker think people have created Twitter clones? Identi.ca, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. None of these have succeeded because they are in some degree crappier than Twitter. Plus, users matter. Why use something similar to Twitter if no one cares and there's no one to follow? Ridiculous linkbait.
- axod 17y ago
  >> "FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. None of these have succeeded" Umm. Sorry? Come again? None of these have succeeded? By exactly which metric are you measuring success here? Please explain exactly how twitter is even as successful as friendfeed let alone facebook. edit: -1 points for questioning how you're measuring friendfeed and facebook as failures? My how times have changed.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    Facebook and Friendfeed's public realtime stuff hasn't been a massive "viral" success in quite the same way as Twitter has been.
    - poppysan 17y ago
      Wow, what a horrible response. Sometimes its better to admit you are wrong, and didn't mean Facebook and FriendFeed. By ANY measurements (viral success or otherwise) Facebook is more successful than twitter.
      - ErrantX 17y ago
        huh? I never said it in the first place :) how could I admit to being wrong?
      - steveklabnik 17y ago
        He _did_ say "public, realtime stuff."
  - jeremymcanally 17y ago
    No, they are not successful. Facebook is successful for different reasons (not real-time updates; this, if anything, has damaged their success). FriendFeed and Identi.ca are not wildly popular. Have you seen either of these on CNN or heard them on the radio? No. They were latecomers that offer little to their users past a service they're already using (likely Twitter or something else).
swombat 17y ago
This headline is over-inflamatory, and the article is pretty far off the mark. Twitter is very good to developers. The only cases where there are altercations are when people use the word "Twitter" in their service's name. That's defending their trademark - something all companies need to do if they want to keep those trademarks. Twitter's not headed for big trouble at all - or at least, that trouble will have nothing to do with the problems mentioned in the article. The main trouble on Twitter's road, imho, is the big battle they're having with Facebook. There'll probably only be one winner in that one.
- axod 17y ago
  I agree... I think the problem for them is that morphing facebook into twitter is simple - you remove features and privacy settings. Morphing twitter into facebook however, is far harder and much more work. You have to build all the tons of features facebook have. I'd be really surprised if Twitter win it out, facebook just look ridiculously clued in to how to beat them, whereas I haven't really seen any changes at twitter in terms of features. Have they added any? :/ Strike that... have they added back in the features they removed? edit: yeah downmod me all you like... or you could reply with a coherent argument.
  - tonystubblebine 17y ago
    I think defining easy and hard for these two sites solely in terms of software development costs is too narrow. It would be extremely hard for Facebook to remove features from a customer relations standpoint. Likewise, it would actually be pretty easy for Twitter to add a feature like photos into the existing feature set without alienating their users. I think also that this idea that Twitter and Facebook are in a head to head battle is mostly media generated. Twitter's strength is its public nature, and Facebook's is its private nature. To say that one will beat the other is to say that either there is no need for private conversation or no need for public.
    - axod 17y ago
      Facebook has already moved toward twitter, and has gained users because of it. They can easily make it easy for people to use the service like they would twitter, whilst making it clear that posts will be public etc. No issues with PR there. If you look back at the last year or so, facebook has moved massively... Yes Twitter could add all the features, and remove things like the 140 char limit, but they don't seem to have moved all that much in the same time. Facebook clearly has the momentum and opportunity. I do think the battle is pretty real, I don't want to go to 2 sites to share stuff, I just want one. And I can - I just post stuff to facebook, and say [Family] or [Friends] or [everyone]. It's pretty much already there.
LostInTheWoods 17y ago
The real twitter killer will be the proliferation of smartphones. Who needs SMS when you have HTTP?
- bsaunder 17y ago
  Not so sure... I use twitter on my smart phone (IPhone) all the time.
- callahad 17y ago
  Proflieration of HTTP-capable smartphones will only help twitter, not kill it.
chrischen 17y ago
If anyone releases a killer feature then Twitter can just match it. But then again it may not all be about how many features an app has but the quality of features.
TrevorJ 17y ago
"Twitter has exactly two things going for it: * the number of registered users on Twitter and the network between those users," That's not exactly accurate. There's a reason Twitter has users. You don't attract all those users in the first place without some kind of feature people want.
tonystubblebine 17y ago
My significant other, who wrote The Twitter Book and so gets asked these sorts of questions a lot, has a pretty effective answer. Twitter as a business may stay or die, but Twitter as a type of communication (short, public asynchronous messaging) has proven popular and is here to stay.
- TweedHeads 17y ago
  "(short, public asynchronous messaging) has proven popular and is here to stay." Exactly my thoughts. There is a real need for that, just add "distributed" to the equation, where nobody controls the ecosystem.
TweedHeads 17y ago
Twitter will never be killed, the same way Wordpress will never be killed. Right now twitter has an advantage that will reduce over time as more and more blogging services embrace micro blogging and define a way to share in real time their content with their subscribers from other providers. If I were google I'd be revamping jaiku with a cooler name and start pushing distributed microbbloging as the new platform (perhaps joining it with blogger). The same for Wordpress and other blogging platforms. Twitter will adapt or die. But will no longer have the strict control over the ecosystem it has today.
jknupp 17y ago
The comments about alienating the development community aside, the post just seems to be the constantly rehashed "it has no revenue model, thus it will fail," argument. I don't necessarily disagree, but I certainly don't think this blog post adds anything to the conversation.
abdulhaq 17y ago
This is the beginning of the beginning of the end of twitter stories. This is the end of my reading beginning of the end of twitter stories.

12 points by amrith 17y ago

In my opinion, all it takes now, is the creation of a small number of killer-apps on clones platform to cement the fate of Twitter. People have been saying this about Twitter since it only had ten users. It was a bit more believable back when Twitter was all-Fail Whale, all the time. Now it just looks like a joke. If you want to predict that Twitter will suffer from competition you must at least name the competition. I see that you kept your list of names safely behind a link. That was a good choice, because the list makes the joke even funnier. (Skittr? Yonkly? Kwippy? Were these auto-generated? Has anyone actually heard of any of these things? My favorite example is the mighty "Dukudu" empire: "auctioned off on eBay, acquired by allesklar.de for EUR 43,208". Ooh, a whole EUR 43k! I'm sure the guys on Sand Hill Road are trembling with fear.) (Not that I begrudge these projects their marketshare. I'm sure they're being run by fine people. I have a funny idea for a microblogging site myself, and I might even launch it with a hilariously silly name. But I'll try to resist the urge to have delusions of grandeur.) Incidentally, how can a business simultaneously have no business model and be mortally threatened by a patent infringement suit? If the patent troll wins and is awarded a 12% royalty, do they have to accept 12% of the losses? ;)

jeremymcanally 17y ago

Uh, sending a C&D to a shady application that uses their trademark in its name doesn't really spell "alienating their developer community." They are one of the most engaging API providers I've ever seen; they actually talk to people via their Twitter account, engage developers via the mailing list, etc. And doesn't this joker think people have created Twitter clones? Identi.ca, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. None of these have succeeded because they are in some degree crappier than Twitter. Plus, users matter. Why use something similar to Twitter if no one cares and there's no one to follow? Ridiculous linkbait.

axod 17y ago
>> "FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. None of these have succeeded" Umm. Sorry? Come again? None of these have succeeded? By exactly which metric are you measuring success here? Please explain exactly how twitter is even as successful as friendfeed let alone facebook. edit: -1 points for questioning how you're measuring friendfeed and facebook as failures? My how times have changed.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- ErrantX 17y ago
  Facebook and Friendfeed's public realtime stuff hasn't been a massive "viral" success in quite the same way as Twitter has been.
  - poppysan 17y ago
    Wow, what a horrible response. Sometimes its better to admit you are wrong, and didn't mean Facebook and FriendFeed. By ANY measurements (viral success or otherwise) Facebook is more successful than twitter.
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      huh? I never said it in the first place :) how could I admit to being wrong?
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      He _did_ say "public, realtime stuff."
- jeremymcanally 17y ago
  No, they are not successful. Facebook is successful for different reasons (not real-time updates; this, if anything, has damaged their success). FriendFeed and Identi.ca are not wildly popular. Have you seen either of these on CNN or heard them on the radio? No. They were latecomers that offer little to their users past a service they're already using (likely Twitter or something else).

swombat 17y ago

This headline is over-inflamatory, and the article is pretty far off the mark. Twitter is very good to developers. The only cases where there are altercations are when people use the word "Twitter" in their service's name. That's defending their trademark - something all companies need to do if they want to keep those trademarks. Twitter's not headed for big trouble at all - or at least, that trouble will have nothing to do with the problems mentioned in the article. The main trouble on Twitter's road, imho, is the big battle they're having with Facebook. There'll probably only be one winner in that one.

axod 17y ago
I agree... I think the problem for them is that morphing facebook into twitter is simple - you remove features and privacy settings. Morphing twitter into facebook however, is far harder and much more work. You have to build all the tons of features facebook have. I'd be really surprised if Twitter win it out, facebook just look ridiculously clued in to how to beat them, whereas I haven't really seen any changes at twitter in terms of features. Have they added any? :/ Strike that... have they added back in the features they removed? edit: yeah downmod me all you like... or you could reply with a coherent argument.
- tonystubblebine 17y ago
  I think defining easy and hard for these two sites solely in terms of software development costs is too narrow. It would be extremely hard for Facebook to remove features from a customer relations standpoint. Likewise, it would actually be pretty easy for Twitter to add a feature like photos into the existing feature set without alienating their users. I think also that this idea that Twitter and Facebook are in a head to head battle is mostly media generated. Twitter's strength is its public nature, and Facebook's is its private nature. To say that one will beat the other is to say that either there is no need for private conversation or no need for public.
  - axod 17y ago
    Facebook has already moved toward twitter, and has gained users because of it. They can easily make it easy for people to use the service like they would twitter, whilst making it clear that posts will be public etc. No issues with PR there. If you look back at the last year or so, facebook has moved massively... Yes Twitter could add all the features, and remove things like the 140 char limit, but they don't seem to have moved all that much in the same time. Facebook clearly has the momentum and opportunity. I do think the battle is pretty real, I don't want to go to 2 sites to share stuff, I just want one. And I can - I just post stuff to facebook, and say [Family] or [Friends] or [everyone]. It's pretty much already there.

LostInTheWoods 17y ago

The real twitter killer will be the proliferation of smartphones. Who needs SMS when you have HTTP?

bsaunder 17y ago
Not so sure... I use twitter on my smart phone (IPhone) all the time.
callahad 17y ago
Proflieration of HTTP-capable smartphones will only help twitter, not kill it.

chrischen 17y ago

If anyone releases a killer feature then Twitter can just match it. But then again it may not all be about how many features an app has but the quality of features.

TrevorJ 17y ago

"Twitter has exactly two things going for it: * the number of registered users on Twitter and the network between those users," That's not exactly accurate. There's a reason Twitter has users. You don't attract all those users in the first place without some kind of feature people want.

tonystubblebine 17y ago

My significant other, who wrote The Twitter Book and so gets asked these sorts of questions a lot, has a pretty effective answer. Twitter as a business may stay or die, but Twitter as a type of communication (short, public asynchronous messaging) has proven popular and is here to stay.

TweedHeads 17y ago
"(short, public asynchronous messaging) has proven popular and is here to stay." Exactly my thoughts. There is a real need for that, just add "distributed" to the equation, where nobody controls the ecosystem.

TweedHeads 17y ago

Twitter will never be killed, the same way Wordpress will never be killed. Right now twitter has an advantage that will reduce over time as more and more blogging services embrace micro blogging and define a way to share in real time their content with their subscribers from other providers. If I were google I'd be revamping jaiku with a cooler name and start pushing distributed microbbloging as the new platform (perhaps joining it with blogger). The same for Wordpress and other blogging platforms. Twitter will adapt or die. But will no longer have the strict control over the ecosystem it has today.

jknupp 17y ago

The comments about alienating the development community aside, the post just seems to be the constantly rehashed "it has no revenue model, thus it will fail," argument. I don't necessarily disagree, but I certainly don't think this blog post adds anything to the conversation.

abdulhaq 17y ago

This is the beginning of the beginning of the end of twitter stories. This is the end of my reading beginning of the end of twitter stories.