As the future of Twitter gets cloudier and cloudier, I keep thinking that it’d be really sad if Twitter died, because there’d be no way to Twitter its funeral. - Simon Dimenco, AdAge
Poor Twitter. Everyone (read: Digg users) seems to be counting down the days until Twitter collapses after the past few rough months. Its a relic, its got a lousy business model, and they’re losing their core userbase. And pretty much everyone’s soooo over Twitter and moved on to bigger and better things.
I’m not going to explain the whole concept of Twitter in this post; check out Mike’s post on Twitter if you want to know more about it and why it rocks. What I am interested in delving into is why is it so wrong if it closes? What does it mean for so many web users who are practically addicted to it, and what does it say about the overall trend in social media?
For one, Twitter is hands down a web 2.0 standard. It introduced microblogging to the world before everyone had a Facebook feed to keep them busy; the longtime friend of bloggers, it’s become the pulse of the online world as a stream-of-conciousness with a collective voice. Its greatness is not in its functionality but in its simplicity; it isn’t trying to be more than it needs to be, and the new features it quietly rolls out usually come in the form of back-end tightening to make the service even better.
So why is it about to die if everyone loves it so much?
Its so-called imminent demise stems from a couple key events/changes. One, Twitter is now competing with things like the ubiquitous Facebook status, FriendFeed, and the like. Two, it experienced some really bad downtime at probably the worst possible time (aka just as everyone was gabbing about their new shiny competitors) and drove people to some of the lesser known Twitter-esque sites that do what Twitter did first, but not neccessarily the best.
More recently, there’s been talks of restructuring the execs in the company. Oh, and apparently terrorists love it too.
For this travelogue, I plan on following the backlash (and hopefuls) for the web phenomenon known as Twitter and its future in the coming months (weeks?).
