Over the past few months, Twitter has been plagued with downtime. They even went so far as to turn of their replies feature, turn off their API and turn off IM integration. The result was that some of the most vocal community members started running elsewhere. Whether it was Plurk, Identi.ca or FriendFeed, there was immediately conversations going on all over the place.
Last night new numbers came out showing that Twitter wasn’t on the decline though and instead it was actually rising in traffic. Those numbers were provided by Quantcast. I’m not so sure about Quantcast numbers though and will be waiting to see what the Compete stats show when they are released in the next couple days.
What is important here is that there appears to be a vocal community which is now active across a ton of sites. How do they maintain their activity? Well, managing their social media identities has become a full-time gig. There is no possible way to be active on all these sites and also have another full-time job. At this point I would say that the social media evangelists and thought leaders have over evangelized the products out there.
I have been evangelizing Plurk, but with FriendFeed and the multiple other sites, I no longer know how to maintain my micro-blogging livelihood. Will the evangelists kill Twitter by running to another site? Probably not. As MG Siegler puts it, “the only thing Twitter has to fear is Twitter itself.” I think sometimes we get a little too carried away with the next shiny object. If Twitter can manage to continue running and can get their act together, I think they’ll continue to be the leading micro-blogging service.
In the meantime, you can figure out if you want to follow the thought leaders off the cliff into micro-blogging bankruptcy. I took the jump. Will you?
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Also, I think it's still fairly safe to say that Twitter is the only microblogging site that has really caught on outside of the early adopters/tech-inclined group. Out of my "real life" friends, none are on FriendFeed, Plurk or Identi.ca.
And last, but certainly not least, any site whose "our site has crapped out" graphic becomes a celebrity is certainly not going anywhere. Long live the Fail Whale!
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This is one of the things that Disqus is trying to do, I think, and it always seems to come back to data portability.
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