Twitter in a tailspin?
Adrian McDermott
April 25th, 2008
With Lee Mighdoll leaving Twitter this week, shortly following the departure of Blaine Cook, there are obviously big problems there. They’ve had lots of complaints about outages and poor service quality recently. So much so that Robert Scoble wonders about their future, and whether FriendFeed will take over their market when they go down.
That’s probably a bit over-pessimistic. So, people are using social news aggregators - of which there are now more than enough to choose from (and FriendFeed still seems to be the pick of them) - to communicate through and in parallel to other services. But Twitter has a large user base, and a unique but non-essential service. As aggregation services mean users can switch temporarily with ease, there is little incentive to abandon it.
Mighdoll had clearly been appointed to sort out scalability, and presumably this was why he had to go. But people are still guessing what Twitter’s plan is or was according to a great piece by Duncan Riley at TechCruch, Twitter’s Business Plan Still MIA.
A couple of months ago, bub.blicio.us noted that in contrast the the Web 1.0 bubble, in Web 2.0:
Companies are using the money to build businesses and communities with many already generating revenue. The focus seems more about strengthening the foundation for scale rather than cashing out. The problems with Twitter have been ‘where’s the money?’, and ‘where’s the scale?’
Tags: FriendFeed, Twitter