Since Twit-Out was announced there has been a lot of feedback via FriendFeed, Twitter, and several other places. The reaction has been mixed, but a lot of people don’t seem to get it.
They don’t seem to get that things don’t work the way the used to. One of the big implications of Web 2.0 is that the control of the conversation has shifted to the community, not the enterprise behind it. So when I say that I’m going to take my conversation somewhere else for a day (see my reasons here), why is it that I’m a moron for doing so?
Jennifer Leggio argues that "disbanding the community" isn’t going to work. Disbanding may be a over-the-top term to use; but either way I think she and others are missing the point. No one is thinking that this is going to hurt Twitter in anyway and no one wants to hurt Twitter. I don’t expect everyone or even a significant amount of Twitter folk to join in, only the heavy users are the ones who are really perturbed enough to join in on Twit-Out. One of the things I want more than anything is for Twitter to realize that the technical problems may soon be dwarfed by the social problems. It’s in my own best interest that wherever I invest my conversation and build community should to allow me to get value from it on a reliable basis.
Now, based on how much you use Twitter, would you say it’s reliable? Some of us use Gmail A LOT. If Gmail were to go down as much as Twitter did, would your reaction be the same? Of course, Gmail has support and a place to go when things are awry, but it’s free, which means we shouldn’t do anything about it right? What would you do without Gmail, go back to Outlook, Hotmail, or Yahoo! Mail?
Our reliance on things like Twitter and Gmail for our community and email, respectively, has forced us to invest one of our most precious commodities: trust. Every time Twitter goes down, that trust gets a little smaller — and Twit-Out is how I’m going to demonstrate that to Twitter. It’s not about lashing back at them or throwing a tantrum; it’s about telling them before it’s too late that the outages are hurting the community more than they may realize.
So rather just whining and complaining I’ve joined a movement to try and accomplish something. That’s how I am. You don’t have to join me, like I said, I don’t expect a lot of people to do so. But you should know that my part of the conversation belongs to me. Those who complain about where I should comment/converse are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Isn’t Web 2.0 About US Taking Control? Tags: conversation, twitter
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The funny thing about twitter is that the recent developments over there with new faces coming in and old faces leaving shows that they are concerned about the outages. Whether they can fix them in a short enough period is a different issue. It’s interesting to me though that over the past two weeks, my usage of twitter has gone down — not because I don’t want to use it — but because I’ve been so busy. So much so that I have not noticed any outages. I have however experienced outages prior to the two weeks
I think for many people who respond to you in a rather laisez-faire or who cares-type manner just haven’t experienced the outages enough in a way that seriously impacts the way they use the Internet and the tools of social media. At the same time — I see no need to criticize those who want to push forward an improvement in service.
At the moment, I’m more so concerned about Canada’s Net neutrality
Absolutely.
And on Canada’s net neutrality — yep, we have some serious issues.
I’m not sure that Twitter is going to “get the message” but hopefully they will. You’re right about the point being discussion is able to happen anywhere. Now that we have lots of services that can facilitate that distribution and aggregation it’s going to be up to the message generation service to innovate and court us with reliability and features. I think FriendFeed has opened a lot of people’s eyes to the possibilities of being able to converse anywhere though it’s still got some room for improvement. Disqus is also helping in that regard. As long as you can provide a way to hook into the conversations in many places then your service is still relevant. If you wall it up or you loose people’s trust because of downtime, your service will die.
There’s definitely room for improvement on Friendfeed, but the conversation is already so much richer than anywhere else and the community is growing.
Thanks for stopping by, glad I implemented Disqus
I was attracted to this blog because of the name, Shey. Because that’s my sons name. But I’ve come to discover a great resource here and Shey’s tag cloud could easily be my tag cloud. I outed twit today and hung on friendfeed. Shey, I’d like to chat with you on skype and do an interview about the social conversation that’s going on. My skype name is walhus if you’re game.
While I generally think it premature to talk of a boycott, it might lighten the load enough for them to fix a few things, instead of just spending time trying to keep it up. And after the last few days, I’m ready for some actual progress.
I think mass contributions/posts to the getsatisfaction.com site would send a much much stronger message than not tweeting for a day.
I also agree with one of the posters on today’s (5/20/08) outage report there http://tinyurl.com/5q2typ regarding the vulnerability inherent in relying on twitter. This type of communication is becoming so relevant to our lives that it becomes a target for attack by terrorist, spammers, hackers, governments, you name it.
So why leave it in the hands of those motivated solely by profit. All these social media evangelists as the related post up there suggests (most of them open source preachers also), and where is the Open Source Twitter project???
Or shit, for that matter, why don’t We The Users, chip in & buy out twitter, forcing it to become open source.
I’m tired of hearing all the self-proclaimed tech gurus (currently a significant portion of the twitter user base) do nothing more than complain.
Haha buying Twitter would be awesome. But a open-source Twitter is an idea buzzing recently
Haha flattering but no thanks; not quite ready for interviews yet
Thanks for stopping by.
great site you have here shey…just surfed in through twitter
Thanks for coming thru — just subscribed to your blog
I already diged this my firend.
regards
smith
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