Will Twitter Thrive?

3/27/2009 @ 1:02 AM in Blog > Internet



So even though Twitter has been around just shy over 3 years now it's only recently becoming a huge success. Ok, I don't know if "success" is the right word, but at least site activity and new users seem to be growing almost exponentially. I've been on Twitter for a few months now under a different user name, but failed to see the value and the appeal of the service. Maybe it's because not enough of my friends use it or maybe it was because of the brevity of a "twit" (you're limited to 140 characters for one "twit") ... I don't know, but the first time I tried it out I probably stopped checking after no more than 3 days.

I decided to give it another go, but this time under "4GEmedia" and with a more public approach. Previously I didn't want my "twits" to be too public which filtered what I posted about and who I "followed" and who I allowed to follow me. This time I'm looking at it differently and trying to not only learn, but educate and possibly "twit" with a few people that have the same interests as I do. Over lunch I talked with @geehwan and @kewlio about how and why some people follow thousands upon thousands of users. I didn't understand how you could keep up with all the word vomit showing up on your screen or iPhone every 5 seconds, but they made a good point. You don't really have to read everything, but when do have the time you can browse through what people are currently "twitting" about. If you catch something interesting you do and if you don't you don't. So far their advice and their approach has been working for me ... it's been less than a week though.


@geehwan has been ranting and raving about this Adobe Air app called TweetDeck. At the time I had no idea what Adobe Air was but quickly learned that it's some bad ass stuff simply because I've always wanted to make desktop apps, but I didn't really have the proper skill set (I'll have to experiment with that later). Anyway, TweetDeck uses the Twitter API to access your Twitter account then helps organize the Twitter vomit to your liking. You can create custom columns with groups of users, columns that search all of Twitter for certain search terms, etc. You can even access your Facebook status updates via Facebook Connect (limited functionality, but will hopefully improve once FB makes more create API calls). Without TweetDeck I probably wouldn't have given Twitter a second chance.

I'm still a little skeptical though. One day I feel like people are just going to stop posting or reading simply because there is a good amount of spam and garbage on there. I'm also skeptical about how Twitter plans on making some coin from all their hard work, bandwidth and storage space. I read somewhere that they just reached a billion "twit" milestone. I can't even image what the back end database architecture looks like ... I'll save that for another post though.

I guess only time will tell if Twitter will be around for good ... and if I'm still on there (you can follow me @4GEmedia).

The picture you see is the notorious "Fail Whale" that you'll see once in a while on Twitter when service has come to a halt. It's cute, but it won't make them money.