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?
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.
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).
I think it's just that you're measuring overall success of the site (where you're undoubtedly correct), and he's talking specifically about the real time aspects (in which he is undoubtedly correct.)
It's not that, it's that people aren't using Facebook for real time communication. "Real time" is incidental to the Facebook Experience (tm) whereas it's one of the biggest parts about Twitter. Nobody is texting to Facebook's short number to update thier status; they're all installing apps to import their Twitter feeds. The difference is significant.
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? ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
In social software there's a big and important gap between the possibility of a social behavior and the existence of that social behavior. In this case, your theory (shared by TechCrunch apparently) seems to be that Facebook, which has proved that there is an enormous market for private social communication, is going to develop a massive volume of public postings, public discussion, and become a destination site for following public discussion.
Here's my theory: no way.
- Defaults rule. If the facebook default is for private than that will be the bulk of conversation and that will set the expectation about how to respond (i.e. it limits forwarding of good posts to strangers).
- Both sites benefit from being simple and easy to use. For Facebook to suddenly imbue every activity (posting, reading, and finding friends) with an understanding of access controls would make it a much more complex site to understand.
Facebook may be copying features, but I don't think it has a chance of becoming the primary tool for public asynchronous messaging any more than it has of becoming the primary blogging platform or primary email platform.
Twitter, is not copying Facebook features because those features don't support its goal for public discourse. Instead they are developing deep contacts with media.
In the end, Facebook may end up with more users than Twitter, but that's an indication of the size of the markets not of one company beating the other.
Both sites grew last month by the way, so it does seem like talking about the demise of either one is backward. Twitter's 6% monthly growth rate compounds to more than 100% per year (if only my investments would do that).
Your argument is flawed because you're making it seem like Facebook competing with Twitter is a technical problem, when it isn't, it's a social, branding and marketing problem. People use the products in different ways. Twitter is associated and popular in the public consciousness on "public updates" while Facebook isn't, and Twitter has a buzz behind it that Facebook doesn't.
By using the same logic as yours, Facebook Marketplace should have beaten Craigslist by now. Or Match.com should have beaten plentyoffish. Or, hell, Reddit should have beaten Hacker News. But they haven't happened, despite all being technically superior and having supersets of the others functionality.
I don't think it will end up where one wins out over the other. I see Facebook primarly as a networking tool, where as I see twitter as a messaging framework. Yes facebook can pare down services to allow real-time messaging and they certainly will, but I think it'll be difficult to start building a place for developers to play and create.
Whereas Twitter intially things open and encourages others to create their features. They are focusing on making their service as reliable and simple as possible. Want more features, well there is an web app for that.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.