Mike Arrington has a post up about how Twitter may not have to survive downtime. He argues that he is now locked into his network on Twitter and that downtime can’t prevent him from using the network. For many users (myslelf included), over the past few days the updates of many friends haven’t been appearing in their Twitter stream.
Definitely not the end of the world but it has had an impact on usage. Conversely, if you take a look at the most recent Alexa chart, the site has been growing at a greater than average pace recently so it doesn’t appear to be stopping user uptake. At this point the real question is if there is another microblogging service that can take over Twitter. While there are sites like Pownce, Jaiku and Friendfeed, none of them have been successful so far at gaining as much user adoption as Twitter.
The only service that I can currently foresee taking over Twitter is Facebook. Users on the site are absolutely addicted to status updates. They update their status regularly and check in on what their friends are up to. The only thing currently lacking is the ability to reply to other users’ status updates. If Facebook added a similar service as Twitter it would instantly stop much of Twitter’s growth. Most of the people I’m connected to on Twitter are already on Facebook and I am connected to them there as well.
While the hole discussion is much ado about nothing, I figured I’d throw in my two cents. Do you think there are any other services that will be able to compete with Twitter?
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And yes, someone could start something else and could get a migration - but it would depend on timing. Could you get the top 10-20 people with most followers over to your new service? That would be Scoble, Brogan, etc. Is there a time in which they all would be sick of Twitter because of the broken functionalities that would actually end up in a mass exodus to something extremely similar?
Facebook is no Twitter. It's an application thang. People don't want a whole browser window to be open all day; take up too much screen real estate. People like their little AIR apps in the corner of their screen sitting open all day to check in from time to time.
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I don't understand why they do their maintenance when they do?
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