I have been seeing lots of articles like Steve Rubel’s Twitter Is Peaking; Get Ready to Follow The Geeks Onward and Larry Green’s response pot, Dear Twitter: Failure is not an option (for branding). Why am I so accepting of all of these Fail Whale “Twitter is over capacity” pages is because nobody could have anticipated the sudden and overwhelming ubiquity of Twitter in the last 90-days.
I don’t know how much Television you watch, but Twitter is everywhere. The last time Twitter had this sort of challenge, they stood up to the challenge — I didn’t experience one Fail Whale during the Inauguration of Barack Obama, for example.
People were blissed and amazed, if they noticed at all (people never notice success, they only note failure).
I know that new users are going to be turned off by Twitter’s current spate of Fail Whales; however, I am sure that the IT ninjas are in high-alert and maxing out every credit card in sight to acquire more servers and a better long-term architecture. And, those men and women stepped up to the challenge of the presidential election and the presidential inauguration and
I am sure they are trying to step up to the overwhelming assault.
The real story is that all the morning and daytime TV shows have invested in Twitter: Morning Joe, Good Morning America, Martha Stewart, The View, Today Show, Bonnie Hunt, Live with Regis and Kelly, The Ellen Degeneres Show, and many others. Now, that’s big news!
While all of Steve Rubel’s Geeks and Techies might be ready to jump, the worst that will happen — the very worst — is that Twitter might turn into MySpace, a property that is still very much a powerful platform for hundreds of millions of people to this very day — and still amazingly profitable for both News Corp and it’s advertisers.
And I guarantee you that the following conversation happened during a board meeting:
Evan Willams and Biz Stone: “We need a quadrillion dollars to buy a bazillion new servers and bandwidth because we’re about to tip into the mainstream, including Morning Joe, Good Morning America, Martha Stewart, The View, Today Show, Bonnie Hunt, Live with Regis and Kelly, and The Ellen Degeneres Show, in the next 90-days.”
The Twitter Board and Investors: “You’ve got to be bloody kidding me! There’s no way that the normal folks at Morning Joe, Good Morning America, Martha Stewart, The View, Today Show, Bonnie Hunt, Live with Regis and Kelly, The Ellen Degeneres Show, and many others would spontaneously decide to join and participate in such a geeky and techie thing such as Twitter.”
Well, guess what? Evan Willams and Biz Stone were right, if they really did make that sincerest of pleas.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Totally agree – there’s no way anyone could have predicted the growth rate. Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder was recently on the show Press:Here (a weekly technology show on the Bay Area’s NBC affiliate). He talks about that being one of their biggest challenges. And the fact that they’re still so small (<40 employees) makes it hard too.
He did make it crystal clear that they are committed to the overall user experience and that they aren’t going to just take money for the sake of revenue (and at the expense of the user experience). He also made a key distinction between ‘search’ and ‘discovery’. It’s a very interesting positioning move that could dramatically increase the value of Twitter itself and for users that harness it. Twitter does ‘discovery’ WAY better than Google.
I don’t complain about the Fail Whale. The service is still completely free. And I don’t have to look at or filter out any advertising. Sometimes these things even themselves out. All those who jump on board because they think it’s trendy or because they think it’s a sales gimmick (it’s not – see this: http://bit.ly/ugR3d) will jump back off just as rapidly because of the growing pains …freeing up bandwidth for those who are using it to network.