Twitter Killer... Or, is Twitter Already Dead?
Death by a thousand cuts seems to be the way Twitter will surrender its lead position in the increasingly competitive microblogging space. A strong competitor has yet to emerge and eat Twitter’s lunch, although FriendFeed and johnny-come-lately Plurk are gaining traction. Pownce and Jaiku too are waiting in the wings. Regardless, Twitter’s star seems to be waning. In fact, the exodus may already be beginning.
Powne and Jaiku are virtually carbon copies of Twitter and it is hard to overtake the leader, Twitter, from a position of at least perceived sameness. Read Marketing Truisms post to see why.
FriendFeend and Plurk are shooting for the Twitter audience by attempting to change what is of value to that audience. FriendFeed is taking more of a lifestreaming / “centralized me” tack. Plurk offers a nicer UI and the ability for users to create conversations around posts.
That said, none of these players has captured the imagination of users like Twitter and not one of them is a seriously challenging Twitter for dominance. Twitter, however, has become a victim of its own success. There has been much speculation around possible reasons for Twitter’s downtime (Ruby on Rails scalability, architecture, key staff departures, etc.) and what appears to be a serious scaling challenge.
Complaints about Twitter downtime have become so plentiful that Twitter created a blog to keep users updated on outages. While I applaud the transparency, they may be going too far.
It also looks like Twitter’s growth might be slowing. None of this is a nail in the coffin, but it points to Twitter’s growing negative momentum. Twitter may not be killed by a competitor, but it is looking more and more like Twitter may collapse under its own weight before it can correct the problems.
I, for one, hope Twitter is able to right the ship… fast. The lifeboats are starting to look pretty inviting. Some may already have left. Once they’re lowered into the water, it is tough to bring them back aboard.
Good luck Twitter.
