Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Technology Doesn't Matter

Check out this article on Social Network reliability. Here are the key comments regarding Twitter:

That’s right — in the second quarter of last year, Twitter was down almost 50 per cent of the time. That is a pathetic and dismal record by almost any measure. There are apps and services that are still in the private alpha stage with uptime records that would put Twitter to shame. But what is the social network that everyone wants to use?


and:

When I wrote about Twitter and its downtime last year, I got a fascinating comment from someone who ran a small technology startup — not a Twitter knockoff, but similar in many ways. They spent a lot of time and money building a great infrastructure, robust and scalable, with all kinds of features. And what did it get them? A great service, with very few users. This person said that he would much rather have had Twitter’s problems: lots of downtime and scalability issues, but also lots of devoted users.


Think about that - a growing service was down almost half of the time. They still are down almost 10% of the time. When I use their web site, I find it slow. It's amazing - and just reinforces basically Brand > All (almost). Twitter has turned into a word, similar to Google - ie "Did you google it?" or "I twittered the conference session." Check out their competitors - names like Identi.ca, Present.ly, and Yammer. Yeah....

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