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Maybe it's not that Stanford MBAs haven't heard of Twitter - maybe it's that the value Twitter offers isn't correctly targeted? If that's the case, it wouldn't matter how well Twitter performs because others will replace it eventually.
FriendFeed at least groups comments under the original post. I'm not a big fan of that "internet blue" interface, but I'm crossing my fingers that styling isn't far off.
I've switched entirely from Twitter's interface to FF's. Now I just wish my friends who only Twitter would join me.
Twitter will only be replaced by another Twitter with less downtime.
its just my redundant fail over strategy for twitter !!
What your exercise did was to reinforce the fact you and your peers live in a sheltered bubbled world using tools that don't offer much business or even normal end user value.
It's this disconnect between the technorati and normal people that seems to lead to perception gaps. You point out one of them (i.e., people who have heard of Twitter vs. those who could care less).
I will point out another. I have many non-techie friends who actually LIKE Twitter and use it regularly. Neither myself nor any of my Twitter-loving pals noticed any downtime. Why? Probably because they access Twitter using Gmail. But I use Twhirl, and I didn't notice any problems either. Perhaps all these people who follow 20,000 other users aren't getting decent performance because they've rendered the service useless.
I don't know, but there's definitely a disconnect between the small army of chicken little bloggers and the larger contingent of silent, happy users.
Twitter is probably the next Friendster
The site/service does definitely have its pro's (established growing user base)and con's (rails), but I'm fairly certain Twitter falls into the Flickr/del.icio.us category of anti-fail in the long-term.
I'm just anxious to see what Google plans on doing with Jaiku in the long-term. I believe there's something up Goog's sleeve that we've yet to hear about in regards to future-Jaiku.
While FF is popular, I think SocialThing has a better approach. Rather than comment at FF, ST posts to the platform one is responding to. So, if I read one of your tweets at ST and respond, it responds to Twitter. To me that is far more powerful than creating yet another social network.
ST aggregates all one's networks and allows him to post directly to those networks from one dashboard. That seems to be the way to go, as far as I am concerned.
How is this any different from the model that Twitter has always had? Twitter gets 10x traffic from the API versus the Twitter web site. I use FriendFeed AND Twitter and the fact that I might respond to a message from FriendFeed is no different from me responding to a message from Twhirl.
Also, I have only chosen to follow a small percentage of the people that I'm following on Twitter (about 50 out of 600) in FriendFeed. If I followed all 600 of them it would be an information flow tsunami and it would make FriendFeed completely unusable from me. I have cherry picked about 50 people from my 600 Twitter friends and that's working very well for me. I really think Twitter and FriendFeed can coexist and complement each other. I don't see it as a competition.
First off - Robert you are a TNBT (The Next Big Thing) evangelist and love to shout out about how great the upcoming services are. Respect for that - I think a large percentage of their growth is down to you and people like you promoting them. This is a good thing...
Twitter is about shouting something out to the empty space that is the web and occasionally getting back something cool. I don't rely on it for conversation (and I hope none of the people I follow do) as the signal to noise ration is very low (and I only follow a hundred or so people) but sometimes you can have a fun conversation or help someone out...
If people are having their conversations hurt by twitter dropping posts they should make sure that people know to contact them by an alternate method if they get no response... It's like CB radios - and old school networking if you don't get a "gotcha, over" or an "ACK" you should assume sending failed or is being ignored or MIGHT be read later.
FeedFriend on the other hand is a big ol' tool for communicating and stalking. I think it's great but I wouldn't replace something like Twitter with it in a million years... Complementary yes - competetive no.
Cheers.
I don't find FriendFeed useful for real-time conversations. For me, it works best as an aggregator, both to publish a stream of what I've been collecting/sharing for others to view and for me to view other peoples' streams. It's interesting to see how differently people are using it. Perhaps an indicator that FriendFeed is looking more like a platform than an application?
It is a work in progress to help them understand the value of Twitter, but at least they have been exposed to it.
Nah nah nah.
Twitter's down. W T F cares?
It does have some major areas for improvement though and I pointed three of the them out here: http://www.samuofm.com/2008/04/22/the-three-thi...