Figure A: Typical Twitter experience /artist’s impression
Scoble has a great rant up today on twitter’s failing as a platform. This is similar to Jevon’s epic (and correct) rant on why you shouldn’t build a business on Facebook… or otherwise on someone else’s platform. At least not unless you are prepared to take the risks.
Risks being: did you know that twitter’s search history only goes back a few weeks? Did you think that all those pithy tweets and all those nice things folks may have said about you in @replies would be around forever as an archive or historical record? Don’t count on it.
Maybe, if we’re lucky, Twitter [see illustration] will be around forever, maybe if we’re lucky they’ll keep alive the archives of bit.ly and twitpic etc. so in the future we’d have some idea of what those links were pointing to. Maybe part of that business model will be the charging for access to the tweet archive. But there’s no guarantee.
To twitter’s fault/credit these problems relate to twitter being a little too good at what they do. It only becomes a problem once everyone (well at least all the cool people) pervasively filter a big part of our daily lives, our ideas, world events, our businesses through this single channel.
Does it make a lot of sense to route the western world’s realtime social backchannel through a single point of failure?
Historically, what is the life expectancy of any hottest new social platform? friendster, icq, geocities, hotmail* all had a good run while they lasted?
reminds one of an old haiku, the zen of 404 messages:
You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.
my advice? go out and invent the world’s next open-standards, distributed realtime social presence application. Or if you don’t have time for that, at least think about archiving your tweets. You never know when you might want them back.
more: Twitter’s platform shortcomings
more: tools for backing up your tweets. I haven’t tried them yet (I should probably get on that). tips?
*cough myspace, *cough* yahoo inc., AOL, compuserve, gopher the list could go on /for another deadmedia post
Sez Ziggy from facebook:
“Citizenziggy Esq. made a comment about your note “Are you backing up your twitter history?”:
I had my twitter account suspended and its a pain in the ass. Albert Lai appears to have the same problem with Twitter — random suspension for no apparent reason.
Twitter doesnt respond and will not return MY content either — not even a copy of it. The way I see it they have stolen my content because I am no longer a standing member and they did not adhere to their own ToS.
Screw Twitter and also screw farcebook for kicking me off here 2 years ago, forcing me to set up a new account and start all over. screw all 3rd party services.
Losing all my old tweets was a concern but fortunately a freind informed me that friendfeed does a decent job in backing up social network content… BUT what does one use to back up freindfeed =) There appears to be a void in teh market for a social networking content backup system.
I concur — DO NOT RELY ON ANY THIRD PARTY SERVICE!!!
Fortunately, I CANNOT BE STOPPED, CENSORED OR STIFLED!! MUHAHAHAHA!!
I WILL SCURRY ON.
CZ!”
By the way, Facebook just bought friendfeed.
Sez Ziggy from facebook:
“Citizenziggy Esq. made a comment about your note “Are you backing up your twitter history?”:
I had my twitter account suspended and its a pain in the ass. Albert Lai appears to have the same problem with Twitter — random suspension for no apparent reason.
Twitter doesnt respond and will not return MY content either — not even a copy of it. The way I see it they have stolen my content because I am no longer a standing member and they did not adhere to their own ToS.
Screw Twitter and also screw farcebook for kicking me off here 2 years ago, forcing me to set up a new account and start all over. screw all 3rd party services.
Losing all my old tweets was a concern but fortunately a freind informed me that friendfeed does a decent job in backing up social network content… BUT what does one use to back up freindfeed =) There appears to be a void in teh market for a social networking content backup system.
I concur — DO NOT RELY ON ANY THIRD PARTY SERVICE!!!
Fortunately, I CANNOT BE STOPPED, CENSORED OR STIFLED!! MUHAHAHAHA!!
I WILL SCURRY ON.
CZ!”
By the way, Facebook just bought friendfeed.
There is a bunch of work moving around already on a public infrastructure for public micro-messaging. I’ve been pushing some stuff here and wrote about some of the other stuff going on <a href=”http://igniter.com/post428″here. To me it’s an inevitable progression that can’t happen soon enough. I’m also planning a 2 day research/hack session in September for Toronto – details coming soon.
There is a bunch of work moving around already on a public infrastructure for public micro-messaging. I’ve been pushing some stuff here and wrote about some of the other stuff going on <a href=”http://igniter.com/post428″here. To me it’s an inevitable progression that can’t happen soon enough. I’m also planning a 2 day research/hack session in September for Toronto – details coming soon.
Hi my name is Bryan and I have just published an eBook called Marketing On Twitter, which shows newbies to Twitter a step-by-step process to generate a flood of traffic to any website or landing page. The eBook is currently in the clickbank submission process and should go live on 10th September 2009. I am looking for REVIEWS. If you – or any of your readers 🙂 would like to review this product before it goes live, please send an email with UNIVERSE REVIEW in the subject line to me at beepy1968@yahoo.co.uk and I will send you a free copy for you to review. Please note this free offer is open until 9th Sept 09 only. Let me know when your review is published (and where) and I will post it on my blog (with your link), and then bookmark it with the top 100 bookmarking sites using bmdemon. thanks! Bryan
http://www.twitteruniverse.info goes live 10 sept 09
Hi my name is Bryan and I have just published an eBook called Marketing On Twitter, which shows newbies to Twitter a step-by-step process to generate a flood of traffic to any website or landing page. The eBook is currently in the clickbank submission process and should go live on 10th September 2009. I am looking for REVIEWS. If you – or any of your readers 🙂 would like to review this product before it goes live, please send an email with UNIVERSE REVIEW in the subject line to me at beepy1968@yahoo.co.uk and I will send you a free copy for you to review. Please note this free offer is open until 9th Sept 09 only. Let me know when your review is published (and where) and I will post it on my blog (with your link), and then bookmark it with the top 100 bookmarking sites using bmdemon. thanks! Bryan
http://www.twitteruniverse.info goes live 10 sept 09
A related story in the news about cloud computing:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6871750.ece
A related story in the news about cloud computing:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6871750.ece