So it seems like a lot of people are discovering and joining twitter right now, which is enjoying a massive growth rate since January. I actually joined twitter on March 9th 2007 and left on May 16th 2008. I had been following what the company was doing since November 2006, so I watched their evolution for a while before diving in.
Twitter can be used for many different things, and I was actually using it for 3 different types of usage. First, to follow a few interesting people, which seems to be the most common usage. Secondly, I used their API to send myself automatic notifications in regards to websites I was running. Basically I had a special account sending DMs to my actual account to notify me via SMS of noteworthy information about a website I’d created. I’d receive an SMS for every sale, as well as one when the website went down for any reason. And lastly I used it to follow topics that I was interested in via IM. You could use twitter over IM at the time and follow specific words (no hashtags, just any word) twitter-wide.
What I enjoyed most was the ability to receive updates by SMS and automatically receive them on IM (GTalk, for that matter) when I was online. Somehow the team behind twitter managed to kill both features around the same time a year ago. SMS updates still haven’t returned in the countries where I’ve lived since then. IM hasn’t come back and won’t. What I liked about Twitter was precisely the ability to use it over SMS and IM. A web-only experience sucked for what I was using it for and that’s the main reason why I shut down my account.
Twitter presumably killed both features because they were too expensive to run, but I believe they did so because they have a long track record of bad decision-making that led to killing great features. Instead of contracting an SMS aggregator that could get them cheap bulk SMS rates in several countries, they sent all their international (non-US) SMS from the UK, paying a premium for anyone receiving SMS from outside of the UK. No wonder why it was costing them a lot of money to the point that they had to shut it down… I know from first-hand accounts that they were offered much better rates by bulk SMS companies, but simply declined.
On the engineering side, the twitter team has a serious case of the “shiny new tech” syndrome. They just keep using new technologies that haven’t proved themselves to work at the scales twitter is dealing with yet. First RoR, then Scala. I’m sure that if this year a new programming language becomes trendy, you’ll see twitter using it. This is a recipe for disaster and one of the reasons why twitter is having so many technical problems. Never mind the fact that telcos have been solving the same problems as twitter for years using proved techs like Erlang. I guess Erlang isn’t cool enough for the twitter folks, since it’s been used to develop scalable messaging systems for 22 years.
Now these are the reasons why I left twitter at the time (the core features I was using were shut down and the feeling that their team was making really bad decisions). But even if twitter somehow hired more competent people – or replaced whoever is in charge of what tech they base their infrastructure on – and brought back the features I enjoyed (IM and SMS) I wouldn’t reopen an account. Because of Facebook.
Since I left twitter, 90% of the people I know or have been to school with have joined Facebook. There is absolutely no point whatsoever in following the same people on twitter. I believe that Facebook does a better job at keeping a good signal vs noise ratio. I can ignore people who post constants updates about their cat’s latest poop without them knowing it. Thus, they don’t feel bad that I don’t want to hear about their pet. On Twitter that same person would know that I don’t follow him/her, which makes it socially awkward. That doesn’t mean I don’t want that person in my social network, I just think that their updates are not worthy of my daily attention. And I think everybody enjoys a better day if they don’t know that.
Aside from my personal contacts, I have a Facebook page for inspi.re. 300 people are fans of it and receive its updates (that is, if they don’t ignore them). The features are so much more compelling with a Facebook page compared to a twitter account when it comes to promoting a brand. I can post videos, images, events and more without forcing people to access them through the extra step that short URLs create.
Facebook still has some progress to do. For example they should definitely allow to block all third-party applications from appearing in the news feed to reduce the annoying noise these can create. They can probably improve the pages further. But Facebook has the most important strategic advantage compared to twitter, which is that they’ve already figured out how to make a decent amount of money. Twitter, on the other hand, while toying with shiny new techs that make their website so unreliable are throwing investment dollars out of the window and have yet to make a dime. The hype they’re suddenly getting is only going to make these expenses worse.
If Google is Twitter’s model in terms of success and not Facebook (get a lot of funding, grow and then figure out how to make money), they are very far from their target on many aspects. First of all, Google excelled from a technical point of view and I remember how reliable it was already in 1999. 3 years after launching, twitter is still very unreliable. Something people tend to forget about Google’s history is that they received their first funding round in June 2000. They launched Adwords in October the same year. So by the time they secured their funding, they probably had a good idea about how they were going to make money. They just didn’t waste money in infrastructure for years like the popular myth of how it’s the way to go for startups. Twitter secured its first round of funding in July 2007 and has yet to launch anything that generates income.
