Twitter Redux.

Tuesday 03 June, 2008

I’ve found it increasingly interesting that commentators believe that somehow, twitter is still — like a bad recurring LSD trip — just moments away from a mass exodus.

Indeed, Twitter has been declared “dead” more often than Jimmy Hoffa and Elvis combined.

“By building up a huge mass of users, Twitter benefits from our existing social connections and their inertia. But as the problems continue, it’s possible that someone else could grab the mindshare – and traffic – that currently belongs to Twitter.” #

It’s more than just the social connection equation. And premonitions of competition swooping in — claiming massive numbers of twitter evacuees — has one rather large flaw. It never actually happens. Why? It’s not for want of trying, surely? Almost everyone seems to believe they have the “winning formula” for a service that will dispatch-and-bury Twitter in a flurry of Web 2.0 candy-coloured craziness.

Yet, despite various attempts, the competition just doesn’t gain traction. And it is because they fundamentally miss-understand quite what Twitter has achieved (and indeed continue to achieve). By seeking to replace Twitter, any competitor will have already sealed it’s fate.

Twitter has captured the hearts — and loyalty — of so many because it has endured still, despite the growth pains, despite the outages and in spite of the competition. There is no doubt that some are frustrated with the continued reliability concerns, colourful tweets about outages are not uncommon — that it encourages communication is clear — even those remarks are made via Twitter.

There is no doubting Twitter was smart from the outset by opening the API and continuing to make steady progress on attempting to bullet-proof the systems in use. That API has unleashed dozens of clients that provide all manner of capabilities. And it allows for increasingly open communication between other social networks, such as Friend Feed and Facebook, not to mention the various and highly creative projects using Twitter to communicate, trend or graph, stalk, punch time or simply just inform.

The increase in communication over very real issues — that any real-time messaging platform will suffer at some point — shows a sense of maturity that is fresh and appealing. That it plays well with others and encourages highly creative use ensures long-term loyalty and helps build tool sets that can become indispensable. Twitter continues to grow and continues to survive, because it thoroughly embraces the culture and spirit that has grown around it.

As we can see, the relatively open Twitter API allows for remarkably creative solutions. By jettisoning Twitter one risks losing so much more than just the simple one-hundred-and-forty character short message service. Far from being at risk of becoming a has-been care of the NextBigThing ^tm I can only see twitter continuing to grow and move forward with ever more creativity.

The smart money is on working with Twitter, and gaining the massive community built around it — ignoring the platform and community it has built, is to invite failure.