The Death of Twitter – The Whale has Fallen

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It rose up like a storm. Building up slowly in intensity and growing larger and larger until it seemed like the whole world was being covered by twitterers.

People were tweeting from China, from Africa, Australia. Every few hours you’d see another country wake up…or head to bed. Time zones didn’t stop meetings, they just gave you an estimate of how long you’d have to talk.

One of the best parts of Twitter was that you could receive it over instant messenger programs like G-talk or Yahoo. Running it through an IM meant that you could easily receive updates without having to open your browser. Even better, it meant you weren’t stuck at 140 characters if you really had something to say.

I chose to use g-talk with it. I love g-talk for it’s size anyway, I can easily put it in the corner of my screen and see chats while I have my browser set at just a bit smaller than screen size.

Chats would fly by at every hour of the day or night, and often I’d look up from a web page and catch an interesting comment that I’d have to add my two cents to, or see a friend post a link that they liked and have to check it out. It was one of the only things that made Twitter manageable if you had more than 40 or 50 friends who liked to send messages.

One of the best thing about Twitter was that it was real. A while back someone asked on which social media sites are you real friends with people. For me, there were only 2…Twitter and StumbleUpon. Both give you real people without all the extras to hide behind.

Twitter had many lovers. For most of us, it didn’t take very long before we started thinking twitter was the greatest thing since Don Juan. Twitter even made it easy to share with friends. The tweets that flashed across my screen were often riddled with @ symbols, showing that conversations were being carried on.

Perhaps it would have been better if Twitter had died with a bang. Like social martyrs, the sites that go out quickly are remembered and missed. I still miss SixDegrees and it’s been gone since 2001. In fact, I’d join today if it ever returned.

Instead, Twitter is dying with a whimper, a sob, and a sigh. No, it’s not on it’s last gasps yet…not quite, but if it doesn’t make some giant changes soon, it will be. And I’m not entirely convinced that it hasn’t already turned terminal.

There is a promise made between people and a website. The promise that if we invest our time and effort into it, then the site will do its best to meet our needs in its specific area. Twitter seemed to do that, and do it well. In fact, many people were making plans to move their company business communications to twitter. Even more amazing, people were suggesting on their own that twitter come up with a way to charge us. And we were willing to pay.

Twitter was awesome during the first political debates. I left the TV off and followed real people who were actually there instead. Tweeters were impressed and we talked about how much we love twitter. But then we saw signs of things to come.

Twitter went down during Steve Jobs speech. It struggled during conventions when people were trying to tweet the events.

Soon, it didn’t matter if anything special was happening, twitter was going down at least weekly…and then daily…and now it’s not surprising at all to see Twitter’s “Fail Whale” and the poor birds trying to lift it up. Or to miss notifications that people have added you as a friend. Or even to not be able to get your direct messages for 3 days and no notification e-mail to see what it says (that happened to me and it was a business message no less).

There are other messaging sites out there. They’re good, but they’re not Twitter. And although I still love Twitter, I’m not going to try to run a business on it. It’s too risky now. Twitter’s already been down this morning. How many more times it goes down today remains to be seen.

No, I won’t leave Twitter. I’ll put up with it’s whimpers, sobs, and sighs. But it won’t be a monogamous relationship anymore. I’ll turn to other sites to provide me with what Twitter’s taking away.

So, you can still look for me on Twitter, I’ll be there, but I’ll also be on FriendFeed, brightkite, Plurk, Plaxo Pulse, and Pownce along with the other social networking sites. And I’ll be on Ping.fm trying to manage all the sites that it takes to replace one Twitter (if you want to try it, the current beta code is “tastyping”).

So what do you think? Is Twitter in its last days? Will you stay with it and bring friends and business partners to join? Or is it time to declare it dead, bury it and move on to if not bigger and better things, at least sites that will be more stable?