Its funny. When the rubber meets the road, or in this case, the knife meets the throat, you can tell whether or not a company has enough savvy and nimble thinking to be a viable and successful business; whether or not the leadership can do what it has to solve the problem.
In the last 24 hours, Twitter is starting to show signs that it isn't particularly savvy or quick-thinking, but I'm not sure that means it won't survive this round. In fact, I think it will.
The facts: Twitter users are experiencing the loss of what seems to be around 30% of their followers and the same of those they followed. That means if you had 1000 followers and 1000 you followed - all of a sudden you would be down to 700 of each. What makes it particularly galling is that there is no apparent pattern nor does their seem to be a way to reconstruct who you lost or who lost you. Even the number of lost favorites seems to be associated with that same 30%. My numbers are considerably less but they are down by 30% to about 160 who follow me and about 100 I follow and 5 favorites - no one loves me, so I can't afford to lose even the three of the eight who professed their desire. My poverty is increased.
But this wouldn't be horrible, though somewhat horrible if it weren't for the fact that this is just the latest problem that Twitter is having, mostly due to it's raging success as a platform - a rather sudden explosion after a year plus of middling growth. There are millions of Twitter users who use it for communicating in short bursts. While its called micro-blogging because it limits the entry to 140 characters, in truth its much more like a dynamic instant messaging service that has social characteristics that go beyond one to one - a sort of one-to-one viewed by many is more like it. There's no real privacy between you and those you directly message - your following/followers can see the message that you send.
But the explosion - now up to nearly 3 million users, possibly more - and the VAST set of interactions between followers and friends and the complex social interconnects it set up were too much for Twitter to handle for the last 3 or so months. For example, Barack Obama has over 39,000 Twitter followers and follows them right back atcha. They each follow others who might or might not be part of the Obama Twitternet and this creates a complex hive that isn't easy to deal with on ordinary hardware.
So the servers started to crash a few months ago. Okay, that's happened to others. But the Twitter team response was to blame its popular users like Robert Scoble and his 25,000 followers for the crash! (actually, they could blame Barack Obama too!! Didn't see that though) That led to an outraged (rightfully) Scoble and a filmed get together between Scoble and the Twitter management where they kissed his butt basically and added servers.
The outages didn't stop and even when Twitter was up and working, the latency was terrible. It would take lots of seconds and even more - up to a minute - not a lot on paper - a lifetime in the cyberworld - to get a "tweet" sent and sometimes it wouldn't be because of this mysterious note you (I) would get saying it "exceeded client requests" (a per hour thing) and you (I) would have to wait.
But it got worse. About 10 days ago, Twitter pages just kind of disappeared and then they were back after a few hours.
That should have told us something.
Yesterday came the penultimate bad experience with the loss of the followers/followees. I say penultimate because frankly, I'm not sure that they won't do something worse. So I'm placeholding for the worst thinking about the time honored "the worst is yet to come."
Here's their explanation....oh wait, I can't actually cut and paste it because the Customer Service site is crashing every time I go to it . I don't even have to click a button to get it to crash - or maybe its that more than one minute latency thing.....
In sum, they claim the problem was a data inconsistency glitch and that they were able to restore a previous version of followers and followees. But that was 18 hours ago they issued that release. There is no update since.
All in all, this is another nightmare for the folks at Twitter - I'd call them good folks but blaming Scoble for the server crash was a bit much and shows me a level of immaturity that seems to run in some of the more successful ones in this crowd. Amazing. Shows the difference between me and them. My immaturity never got me ANYWHERE.
Is This Goodbye, My Tweeps?
Does this mean that we're going to see Twitter go bye bye and all my Tweeps (Twitter people for you Geico cave people out there) run away?
I doubt it. They haven't jumped the shark yet though the size of the tuna they did jump was HUGE!
They're getting close but there are several things that say that people will live with this for awhile longer.
- Twitter is part of the ordinary communications fabric of a lot of people. Its easy, comfortable communications and virtually effortless. The rants over the problem take far more effort than the actual creation of a Tweet. And the age group of the Twitters knows no generational bounds. That means that the cost of leaving, at the moment, is far greater than the cost of staying. Inertia can rule the day. The key is that it is an "ordinary" way to communicate, which as many who are too caught up in "coolness" don't realize, is a much much better place to be than cool. Think of it this way. If you owned the royalty stream on the "ordinary" doorknob, how rich would you be?
- The alternatives are dicey at best. There have been several attempts at Twitter alternatives like identi.ca and Friendfeed, more of an aggregator than a Twitter alternate. They all have their charms, and Friendfeed has some followers of numbers and note, but when it gets down to it, none of them has such a compelling value prop that its worth making the shift to them and off Twitter. Yet.
- There are a number of absolutely wonderful Twitter clients that have enhanced the value of the good basic product manifolds. For example, Twitterific on the 3G iPhone has a button built in to allow you to immediately send an emergency tweet with a Google map of your location attached, taking advantage of the 3G iPhone GPS chip; Twinkle also for the 3G iPhone has a "Nearby" tab that allows you to find active Twitterers within 1-5-10-25-50 miles;OutTwit is a client that integrates directly with Outlook and thus makes the tweeting as easy as email. Even will create a folder for each of the Twitterati that you're following. and automatically generate a TinyURL a shortened URL; finally an Adobe Air client, TweetDeck which allows you to create columns to capture specific tweets and searches so that you can follow specific conversations or threads easily. That just begins to barely touch the surface of the added capabilities for Twitter clients. No other similar service has anything like that ardent a community of developers who are delivering as quickly.
- There is an emerging business value to Twitter that has companies investing in it at levels that would make them loathe to leave so soon. I did a post on some of the business opportunity in Twitter that you can (re)read. But since then I've found @ComcastCares has gotten Comcast not only good press but has moved them up the list of the least liked customer service to.... the least liked customer service. Oh. All in all, though, there are marketing opportunities, event management, customer service responsiveness and the ability to break down corporate barriers to access using Twitter making it a pretty valuable tool that is being incorporated into many businesses as it crashes and, well, it hasn't burned yet.
I don't think that Twitter will be abandoned. The first reason is the foremost reason. It is increasingly becoming part of the ordinary fabric of communications for many people and because it is so easy to do, they just do it. Think about it this way. How many of you have horror stories about cell phone providers or airlines and yet you still use a cell phone and still fly.
But Twitter take heed. You haven't reached even vaguely to the level of ubiquity of my examples, so you're at the point you can be wiped off the map but being abandoned wholesale by your users and you won't even be missed by a lot after awhile. This is the time to step to the plate and whack one out of the park somehow. Don't know what to do about that nor do I have a clue about the resources and funds you have to do it.
But you'd better or all your Tweeps will be just Peeps once again soon enough.
Oooooh. FINALLY got it to cut and paste. Here's the response I spoke of above. Note the hours ago when Jason replied. (Those URL links are theirs. I don't know where they go). Also note how many people think this solved the problem. Hmmmm.
We were able to restore to an earlier version of the relationship data. You may still see out of date information for one of the following reasons:
1) The changes are still propagating out to all parts of the site. It will take several hours for the data to be correctly reflected everywhere.
2) There may be some missing data as a result of this restore. In particular, changes you made to your social relationships in the past 12 hours may not be reflected.
3) Notwithstanding the first two points, the counts that appear in your profile for followers or followings may be slightly different than they were before. Those counts are generated from a cache that was not always a perfect reflection of the true data. Therefore, the counts may slightly change.
I completely understand how frustrated everyone is by this outage. Thanks for your patience as we recover and work to make sure it won't happen again.
3 people say this solves the problem
Great Post! I had a good experience with @ComcastCares. They took care of my digital upgrade thanks to their presence in Twitter.
jesus_hoyos : after 15 mins waiting I hung up on Comcast. I wonder what their Average Abandon Rate is 2008-05-19 22:51:49
comcastcares : @jesus_hoyos Can I help? 2008-05-19 23:45:00
comcastcares : @jesus_hoyos We can help with that. [email protected] 2008-05-21 10:22:36
jesus_hoyos : on the phone with comcast ... taking care of my HDTV upgrade 2008-05-23 09:56:57
jesus_hoyos: @Earl_LaChance thanks to Twitter my comcast issue was solved! back to work now! 2008-05-23 10:08:58
Posted by: Jesus Hoyos | July 26, 2008 at 05:02 PM
"Dynamic instant messaging." Paul, that' the term I'm now going to use to describe Twitter, rather than "micro-blogging."
I'm a semi-caveman since I have above 5 people following me and I follow about five more. I haven't been able to make it a priority to get more involved. But I hope they overcome their issues because I can see that there are ways that Twitter can be used in both the business and the nonprofit sectors. Probably government as well.
I know that the American Red Cross has investigated using Twitter to help people find their relatives after a major disaster (a la Hurricane Katrina). FEMA could probably do the same.
Posted by: Glenn | July 25, 2008 at 09:03 AM
Great post Paul. But what the hell is this "maintenance mode" stuff from the Twitter guy? When managers of a company suggest they operate like a computer does to crises such as this, you kind of wonder whether they all need an upgrade to something more fit for purpose.
Ian Hendry
WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Posted by: Ian Hendry | July 25, 2008 at 07:00 AM