Feb

28

Dave Winer on Competing with Twitter: Emotion and Reliability

February 28, 2008 |

I think its fitting that Dave Winer’s post on competing with Twitter just hit TechMeme while Twitter’s API backend seems to be down and out once again.

Among others, Dave is picking up some ideas that the guys from Assetbar discussed a while back:

#4 It must be possible to use your clone when Twitter goes down and then switch back to Twitter when it comes back up with no loss of data. If you want smoothe entry into the market you must serve as a backup, earn your place with the users. Everyone will love you because it gives Twitter a very real concrete incentive to become more reliable.

The idea is that any new service is not going to be a Twitter “killer.”

My favorite part of Dave’s post is #5 though:

To everyone, twitter.com included — this is a utility like email or IM. Reliability is key. If it’s going to be used in business (very powerful idea) then auditability is essential. To assume that users love the product is not a good idea, any emotional connection becomes a negative if you can’t keep the system up.

I indeed enjoy using Twitter, but because it is so unreliable, I find myself spending more time with discussions on FriendFeed, which gives me a lot of twitter-like abilities without the down-time (and almost all me Twitter followers are also active FF users, which helps).

But while me conversations from Twitter carry over into FF, its a one-way street, as FF doesn’t feed the discussions back into the Twitter stream.

So while I don’t ‘love’ Twitter, I find a great tool.

My use of it isn’t driven by emotion - however, the relationships formed with people on Twitter are, in a way, ‘emotional.’ That emotion with me to another place - like FF - even when I leave Twitter behind. The ability to create these relationships is what makes Twitter a powerful tool - but only when it works…

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