Twitter is dying.
Here are the symptoms:
- Microblogging peaked and began the descent into the trough of disillusionment in Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycle for emerging technologies
- Twitter has long suffered unscheduled outages due to architecture, scalability, and now Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. And they lose users each time they are down.
- Facebook acquired FriendFeed (long considered the Twitter heir) AND released Facebook Lite.
- The main problems Twitter has (lack of context, no threading, weak search tools) still remain deep within it
Is Twitter gently going into that long night?
Well, no so fast.
Although Gartner indeed positioned microblogging (of which Twitter is just one example) as declining, that is actually the time when technologies start to take off in adoption. Forget Ashton and Oprah, that was no real adoption – that was hype. This is the time when organizations will begin to realize the power of microblogging and the applications for the enterprise, understand the lessons learned, implement best practices, and make sense of the technology.
Actually, critical mass (around 30% of adoption in enterprise) is not reached until a technology begins to climb out of the trough. In that aspect, Twitter has not even reached its potential market.
There is a lot of market to conquer.
Is Twitter the right application to do it? Unfortunately, no. The weaknesses are too deep into the infrastructure to allow it time to fix them.
Is Facebook + FriendFeed + Facebook Lite the Twitter-killer? No, that is not going to be the case either. They also lack context (it is a little bit better, using groups and networks), and their search is not better than Twitter’s.
Is there another application out there? Maybe, but the interface and the way it works is going to be different. Twitter won’t disappear (although it will be acquired into a larger platform), nor microblogging will go away. The customers like the ability to receive instant gratification for complaints, even if it is not completely solved, and there is value in the platform.
There will be other, better tools.
The idea of short messages in real-time has lots of value for both customers and enteprises. However, for the new tools to emerge it may be time for Twitter to gently ease into the long night…
_______________ In case you are interested in the poem, you can find it here
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Esteban,
Interesting thoughts as usual. One alternative to Twitter for the Enterprise is Yammer.
Visit http://www.yammer.com – I have no affiliation with the company (though I know an internal exec personally). I have used the platform and there is a growing list of businesses who have had success in deploying it.
Best regards,
Brian
Very interesting thought Esteban, another reason could possibly be as Brian has pointed. Companies are starting to adopt internal micro-blogging tools (including mine) – and to promote internal tool’s usage – companies might block ‘Twitter’ access – or employees might not find time to be available on both channels – which again might contribute to Twitter’s decline.
But for that there should be a better tool available, as you’ve pointed. I do wish that Twitter keeps on enhancing its capabilities! … so that it keeps its microblogging leadership (and we are spared from creating another login and re-finding ppl whose posts we love!)
Thanks for the interesting post.
Regards,
Sid
@SiddMishra
I’m glad to see you make the point tht the position on the hype cycle is not a bad thing. I expect to see microblogging moving nicely along the path to maturity fairly quickly, whether or not that is based on Twitter.
A point I’ve made on my blog earlier ( http://bit.ly/18MoTw) is that I don’t think that Twitter is in this game to provide bells and whistles. They want to build a honking great mass of content, which grows all the time. They will depend on others to add the functionality. If they can own the tweets, they don’t need to control the tools that contribute them. So far, no one seems to be challenging them there, although Facebook has the best chance.
Brian,
Thanks for the read and comment. I know of Yammer, but need to get more details on the product and implementation. Adding to the list to ask for briefing.
From what I know, I am not sure it yet has the robustness to support large implementations. But it was a very light research conducted in haste. Will follow up with them and educate myself to express informed opinion and not ignorant babble.
Thanks Esteban
Sid,
Thanks for the comment. You bring up two very interesting points that I see.
One, the emergence of internal twitter (and similar) networks. This is troublesome and I actually wrote about the complexity of network interactions between social networks some time back. This becomes a barrier to progress, in some cases (depending on the policies) severe enough to hinder potential progress and relinquish each network to live within itself only. Not fun or good.
Alas, your second point (related to the interconnection between networks) is something that should be explored in more details. Initiatives like OpenID may, and I am saying may here, be able to sort through this and create a central directory of people regardless of their networks. Will see. However, this is a critical step forward for communities to succeed. We need to find a way to translate not only names and ID and passwords, but also reputation, trust levels, and contributions from one community to the other.
This is going to be a critical component to succeed in these complex models we are building.
Thanks Esteban
Jeff,
Though I don’t claim to know all of Twitter’s goals (though we got a glimpse a few weeks ago through the TechCrunch leak), it seems that their direction and greatest value is as you have described.
I see that it will likely go one of two ways (Twitter is to microblogging as AOL was to ISPs – bad move?), or Twitter becomes the “exchange platform” for mico-content while others build complex interfaces and algorithms to manage and interact with that content (perhaps think NYSE?)
I am trying to draw an analogy to other models and industries, but am drawing a blank. I know they are certainly out there. Curious on your collective additional thoughts along those lines.
Jeff,
I share your frustration with the understanding of the HC. It is a great tool as part of an arsenal, not standalone, and does a great job at reflecting technologies adoption rate.
That is an interesting observation (and good discussion on your blog as well) you make about becoming the highway (of sorts) for microblogging. Still cannot see a business model out of that (advertising? tolls? right-to-use?) but it would make it certainly interesting.
I am though, and you probably have more visibility into their architecture, about their ability to scale. Seriously, if we are going to see the type of growth that will come out of the next 2-3 years as they transition through the other stages in the HC, how can their architecture support it? It already seems at times to be straining to keep up (there are dropped tweets here and there across clients, even their web interface).
I am also concerned that the context and the search are not 3rd party operations, talk about not having a business model, so it is something they need to fix – and am not sure if it is possible (make that feasible) for them to do so.
I would be interesting to see if FB does a good job of coming after them, or if they will continue to play their “we are cooler, have a better interface” card. FB Lite from what I saw is not worth of the title of contender.
Thanks for the comment, looking forward to more conversations.
Brian,
My money is, unfortunately, in the first scenario you propose. Twitter is the next AOL, or the next MySpace. Great flash in the pan for a while, but not a lot of thought on how to follow-up.
I don’t think that Twitter was built for the kind of traffic that they would need to handle as the highway for micro-content, and I still (as I said in my reply to Jeff) cannot see the business model behind that.
I don’t think there is an analogy, but it would be very telling to go back and look at different models used by first-to-market (e.g an Apple iPod versus a MySpace). If the growth becomes comfortable, then innovation takes a leave of absence and the product dies a slow, horrible death.
I am not putting money on it, but I have a feeling (spidey-sense) that it will end badly for Twitter (I think that an acquisition would also be bad, btw)