michael favia

I joined twitter (on pain of death) a couple 2-3 years ago when it made its real first local debut at SXSW here in Austin. It caught on hard and fast and became the defacto schedule of "events worth attending" for attendees of the conference. My early experiences with the service were valuable and informative but as the service and my social network grew the signal to noise ratio inverted and it lost my attention because there were simply easier ways to follow pertinent topics and people.

Like any vogue tech, Twitter has been adopted and employed for tasks well outside its realm of intent to varying degrees of success. Its recent adoption and poor fit with mainstream media (Im looking at you CNN) is just another dissapointing attempt by the networks to remain relevant as they watch their influence, ratings and revenue fall. While I see Twitters value in adhoc organization (locale specific events like conferences. I used it again this year at SX) and message broadcasting to large groups of individuals (for crowdsourcing when you need help on a tough project) I continue to fail to see the long term value proposition for the user.

Twitter intelligently forwent confusing layers of privacy and groups organization to improve their growth metrics. Getting people to understand the concept of "texting to the internet" was probably enough of a gap that they shouldn't dare add extra layers where things could go wrong. It remains though that this design decision poorly positions Twitter in the face of their astonishing growth and I feel that they are poised to become victims of their own success.

Twitter united the walking masses of cellphone users together with each other and their cubicle tied brethren, but the world moves on and is quickly rendering Twitters primary mode of communication between these people moot. When you consider its over reliance on the texting population to provide its competitive advantage you realize that this ever dwindling number of users is being replaced by those toting smart phones capable of installing a rich client from the Android market or the iPhone.

Once we reach a critical mass of people with this capability (I think we are close if not over that line) the single hold of a service like twitter is forced to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google (Latitude, Messenger, etc). This is a multi-front war I they lose in every category (users, features, prospect). Those who want deeper support for sharing media can rely on facebook to provide the common repository for deposit and consumption and those who desire the simplicity of simple messaging are left to the traditional XMPP based services.

You wont hear it come from me often but I think its the most responsible path at this point is to concede the inevitable, integrate with one of these future competitors and accept the huge cash payout that you earned. Use the money to create more social upheaval and creative destruction with your next project. You DO have another idea right?