About fifteen minutes after Twitter came on the scene, alternatives started crowding through the door behind it. So far, none of them have really made a difference. Why the crowd?
There are ads
And as they say, if the product youre using is free its not the product, youre the product. This seems to be the main driver behind App.net.
I like App.net, but I dont like this argument, even though I also mostly dont like ads. Youd have to be a moron to ignore the historical success of services which are free, but with (mostly-disliked) ads. The proportion of people reading this who havent used such a service in the preceding 24 hours rounds to zero.
So App.net seems like an interesting science experiment to me; Id be surprised if it worked, but thats true of all the best science experiments.
What Twitter should do about ads is insert smart, flagged, targeted, ones that share its prime virtue of concision, open the doors to clients, and impose only one rule on client builders: Dont fuck with our ads.
The Fail Whale
They survived it. Nuff said.
140 characters, no pictures
Thats a feature not a bug. I think the Right Number is maybe a little north of 140, but Will Shakespeare wrote brevity is the soul of wit in 1602 and thats just as true today.
Its just really hard to improve on an extremely dense stream of utterances, the utterer of each having been forced to think about how to compress what needed to be said into the space available.
The earliest wave of Twitter-replacements was all about giving you a little more room and a little more multimedia, and theyre pretty well gonzo. (Hm, Plurk still seems to be there.)
No open API
Twitter has one, but its pretty ruthlessly controlled and theres no suggestion that Twitter is interested in interoperating with anyone as a peer.
This was one irritant that led to the rise of identi.ca, whose call to arms was being based on open-interop. And indeed, if there were a will to build microblogging services in a truly interoperable way, the technology probably wouldnt be a barrier.
Im on board with this gripe; it still feels to me like a bug when a large-scale Internet-based communication channel is also a proprietary product.
Its not Open-Source
Oh well. Not in my top-10 gripes list.
Ownership
This is something that serious Twitter users should consider seriously. If you care about what you write, bear in mind that what you write is Twitters as much as yours; you should assume that they can and will use it for whatever business purpose seems good to them, whether you like it or not. You should not assume that theyll even make it possible for you to retrieve your own words.
I repost my Twitter to my blog because I really want to have things I write available from a space I control; but I understand that this is a minority viewpoint.
Shaky business model
If you like Twitter and are willing to make a bet on it, you should be worried whether theyre going to last. So far, Ive seen very little evidence of coherent ideas on how theyre going to go about making money. I had some Twitter shares and I sold them.
What Twitter should do about ads is is insert smart, flagged, targed, ones that... oh wait, I said that already.
Theyre meanies
Well, yep, history would seem to show that its not advisable trying to build a business based on partnership with Twitter, where by partnership I mean a relationship where they can turn your business off any time they feel like.
Welcome to the private sector. The only relationships with a chance have to be mutually beneficial.
The Future
Me, I suspect that Twitter will make it through, will remain useful, but never become a titan. Id like to see real interoperable short-form publishing, but I suspect that the current melange of Twitter and Facebook and Google+ and whoever else can make a go of it is about what were stuck with.