Making Twitter Sticky
I read this post at How to Split an Atom, on the recent problems with Twitter and participated in a nice discussion.
Twitter is a nice little service. I hesitate calling it a product, even though it has some high profile investors. A product, by my own definition is something you can sell. A service is something you can use. I use Twitter, but I can’t figure out how they’d make me want to pay for it (or as an alternative, monetize my use).
I really like aspects of Twitter. I see conversations that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen, and I meet new people (in the online sense at least). It’s a great tool to keep in touch, and learn what’s going on today, and what’s important to people you have things in common with.
Beyond the obvious “how is it going to make money?”, the question I have with Twitter is: What makes it sticky? What prevents people replacing it with something else? Nothing that I see. Would there be pain if I left Twitter, and wanted to ‘take my audience with me?’ Probably. But is that pain enough to stop me from paying more attention to FriendFeed each time I get an API Error in my Twitter client? No. I’m sure you can use the API to help port users to another service if you wanted.
Twitter is in a similar position to Tivo. I love Tivo. My experience with DirecTv has been significantly worse since they replaced my Tivo box with their in-house branded DVR. But, am I going to cancel DirecTv and go with the more expensive cable just to stick with Tivo? No.
Twitter has to be more sticky if it wants to survive. I think it needs to understand that it is a transport mechanism first and foremost. The 140 character limit, the lack of threading, the concept of followers, all those are interesting but completely replicatable.
But if you look at it as a communications gateway to and from my phone\blog\sms\rss\blog comments\friendfeed discussions\etc, then it becomes indispensable. As Fred Wilson quotes a friend in this post: “It’s not so much the data that’s so valuable, it’s the flow of information through it.”
When Twitter becomes the defacto transport of data through the various social media outlets THAT is when it gets sticky.
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