It seems that Scott has jumped ship from Twitter to Jaiku and intends to foment a one-man revolution (amongst the edtech people at least). I don’t intend to follow… yet.
The important thing about any social network service is the people– to some degree it trumps even stability. If it didn’t, none of the popular apps would have any users anymore! I remember when del.icio.us and flickr, to choose a couple of Web 2.0 poster-children, had the exact same kind of problems as the number of users scaled up and various lessons were learned by technology development teams who suddenly had to deal with the consequences of getting that tiger by the tail.
Any service that is intended to support a constant, nearly real-time stream of input will, of course, make its instability known more regularly. So flickr downtime is less frustrating than del.icio.us downtime, which is less frustrating than Twitter downtime. And, of course, the user who is already skeptical about the value of the activity may be the quickest of all to move on. But I’m not ready to jump ship yet– I mean, how long have most people been actively Twittering– three months or so at the outside? Is it really time to panic, to decide its unworkable, or even speak of Twitter’s “historic” problems?
I am a pragmatist… if enough people I want to interact with decide to flee, then I will too. If I could find a less annoying way to participate in both areas, I would… but I don’t use Furl or Magnolia or Photobucket or Zooomr, despite each having an arguably greater feature set and in some cases more reliable services because the people just aren’t there and trying to maintain multiple presences is an exercise in frustration.
All of web 2.0 is people — Soylent Green. I was a Twitter junkie a couple of months ago and I have slowly eased my constant use down to a tweet or two a day. Sometimes I get a bit inspired by it and go tweet crazy, but for the most part it has slipped into the background noise of some of the other social spaces I visit. Maybe it is because I have been spending more time spinning up new (virtual and real) communities around my campus or maybe it is because I have been in a ton of meetings lately, but Twiter has slipped.
Their technology issues have bothered me as well. Will I jump ship to the other services? Sure, if all 135 of my followers and friends go. But these tools are so lame if there isn’t a little bit of personality in the community. My first run in with Twitter made me feel stupid — and then a bunch of my real friends got in. That was the social ah-ha moment for me. At any rate, I share much of your feelings.
But, with that said, I wouldn’t have come to this link today without hitting the Twitter stream.
Twitter is still the best service (of it’s type) out there - downtime or no downtime. Jaiku hasn’t completely reached Twitter’s feature-set (yet), although Jaiku’s ability to import RSS feeds appealed to me.
Personally, the community I’ve developed at Twitter is really just a “perk” of the system. I started using Twitter for it’s features, not it’s community aspect. Although now that I’ve been using Twitter for a while, I can see how it would be hard to simply ditch that community for another.
I tried using Jaiku, and I felt like I was talking to an empty room. This was the same feeling I had when I started using Twitter, but that feeling soon left when I started adding friends, etc.
The point is - any social application usually begins with isolation, and soon after changes to a feeling of being “accepted.” Whether you continue to use it (or not) depends on how you measure the instability with the community. If instability is more important to you, then you’ll leave. If community is more important, you’ll stay and cope with the instability. I imagine this is why most non-technical people stick with MySpace - even though it’s buggy as hell, it’s all they know, and all they’re friends are on it. They’ve accepted the instability for the community.
Personally, I think community can be gained anywhere, so it’s silly to stick with an application that either doesn’t work, or restricts you from using it for what it was intended to do.
I look at all new applications as an opportunity to transform the stuff I do in new and exciting ways. Community will eventually come along with that.
Bottom line - I too would jump to Jaiku (no rhyme intended
if it had the same features as Twitter.
Your gift for understatement is showing.
For me, Twitter doesn’t have a lot of features that are meaningful outside of the community aspect… I’m not even sure what that would look like!
Beau– me, understated? That may be the first time anyone has said that to me
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