I’m a huge fan of Twitter, but it’s been wonky since Saturday and today it just got too much.
I was happy to take it as random downtime, and wait for it to get back to normal by tomorrow. Until I read something from Bryan Person:
My friend Jack Hodgson is convinced that Twitter’s death is coming, and that we should start preparing for it now. It’s nights like tonight that I really think he’s onto something.
What? Twitter’s death? Life without Twitter? No way!
Death or no death, people around the blogosphere are beginning to notice. Dan York also weighs in on how we have come to rely on Twitter, while Frederic and Paris Lemon approach the issue the same way I do. For the tool that enables conversation and for people to stay connected, Twitter sure isn’t communicating much about what is going wrong.
It does make you think how this affects organisations who have invested time into Twitter like @downingstreet (for the British Prime Minister’s office) and @deltaairlines as a means of keeping in touch with the public? A loss of faith in Twitter? Migration to another platform?
If Twitter does go down, who will you turn to? Scoble thinks it’s FriendFeed. I’d go for Facebook Chat, if only they’d implement it for me already.
Tags: @deltaairlines, @downingstreet, bryan person, facebook chat vs twitter, friendfeed, friendfeed as an alternative to twitter, friendfeed to replace twitter, life without twitter, no twitter, twitter, twitter down, twitter downtime, twitter's death, what would you do without twitter
April 23, 2008 at 1:38 am |
Thanks for referencing my post, Daryl. I don’t really know where I’d go if Twitter died. When the site was having trouble last year, a bunch of us signed up for Jaiku. But as soon as Twitter was working again, we went back there.
What would really happen, of course, is that the community would be dispersed. Some might go to FriendFeed, others to Facebook chat, others to both, others to neither.
But I’m hoping Twitter gets its act together soon and we can stop worrying about this topic altogether!
April 23, 2008 at 1:40 am |
Bryan, I had to! I was reading blog after blog about how Twitter is down and yaddayadda, but never thought “What if it dies?”. It’s really a huge, mind-boggling question.
But I agree, Twitter has so much potential, I just hope we get a 100% stable Twitter very soon! I can handle a couple of hours of disruption, but an entire weekend is just too much!