What will kill twitter?
I see three flaws that can kill Twitter:
- Other services out-innovate due to flaws in twitter’s underlying infrastructure.
- People you don’t know posting randomness will get boring.
- Spam.
Interestingly, I see a lot of parallels between Blogger and Twitter, which are both services from the same person: Evan Williams (also Biz Stone).
Blogger is known internally as the red headed stepchild of Google. The architecture behind Blogger was very poor, the infrastructure depended heavily on FTPing files around and was a nightmare, although Google eventually reworked it. While they were busy solving their scalability nightmares, wordpress and other services ate their lunch.
I’m not sure who will succeed twitter, but it’s most likely to be friendfeed.
Personal blogging had a huge hype behind it. Blogging had the covers of all the magazines and everyone and their brother made their own blog, publishing whatever random crap they were up to. (kind of like this blog) But blogs peaked a little while ago, and the mania has started to die off.
Twitter is different from blogging in that… you can only write 140 character blog posts. Oh and you can post from your phone. Something I rarely if ever see people doing. (smartphones dont’ count)
It turns out (a) it’s a pain to publish whatever crap you are doing on a day to day basis. and (b) no one wants to read about it anyways.
The third problem that Blogger faced was an explosion in spam blogs. It brought down the whole brand. Blogger development also stalled while they dealt with the spam invasion. Even today, a large number of blogger blogs tread the line between spam and not-spam. I’m not sure if Google gives SEO credit to blogs hosted on blogspot, or if their API is just sufficiently convenient that spammers love that site. Probably the latter.
I’ve been having spam problems with twitter from month one. Spammers follow you and email you and @reply you, it’s a big deal. Twitter also has a good Google reputation, so I expect this trend to continue onward.
I’m not saying microblogging will go away, or that twitter will die in 2009, but everything has a life cycle and these factors I think are driving towards twitter’s demise.
