Lately there doesn’t seem to be a day that goes by when Twitter isn’t being mentioned somewhere. whether it be those talking about how they use it or those talking about what it needs to add to keep ahead of the competition. Heck I’ve even a few posts about the service myself not mention that I am the developer of TwitBox; a desktop client for Twitter.
What I find interesting though is what some folks seem to think it would take to kill Twitter. Whether it be file transfers ala Pownce or to be able to track conversations in some fashion or another, someone somewhere is armchair quarterbacking Twitter and what they should be doing. So I decided to hustle up myself an armchair and toss out a few suggestion; especially in light of my post the other day on the simplicity of the service.
There are basically 4 things that some-one would need in order to give Twitter a serious run for its money:
- Simplicity - don’t listen to all the feature freaks out there who would hand you a list the size of War and Peace of features you should have. Number one rule - keep the interface simple. Sure you can make it look better than Twitter - it wouldn’t take much - but in the end make it as simple or even simpler than Twitter to join and use.
- Have all the feature available via a public API from the first day you take on users - hell if you can, get it out to some good developers to go to town on. That API will be you lifeblood so make sure it is robust and very extensible.
- Make sure you have some of the big boys in the tech blogosphere on your side as well as a crew of really good bloggers from in the blogging trenches ready to let loose once you go public.
- But the #1 and I mean the big kahuna #1 thing you have to make sure you do is build the damn thing on a stable platform. If you can provide the above sitting on top of a platform you don’t have to coddle everyday in the hopes that it won’t come crashing down and landing you on your ass - well you might just have a chance of doing a Cock Robin to the Bluebird.
Just my 2 cents.
Conversation Tags: Twitter, social networks
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Excellent as always. Simplicity is Twitter's greatest strength and needs to remain central to it's growth plan. Of course what good is planning for the future if your platform is down 20% of the time.
It's an interesting discussion, building a distributed version of Twitter. Certainly Automattic's Prologue is a tool to investigate - though it's just a theme for WordPress. Of course, take the RSS from a Prologue type blog - several in fact, we're distributed, run them all through Yahoo! Pipes, and what could we come up with? Something that I think I need to spend a few hours investigating, that's what.
Regards,
Rick
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http://chrisbrogan.com/twitter-packs-a-way-to-s...
http://chrisbrogan.com/twitter-packs-goes-off-t...
And I think there could potentially be room for both.
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