Tag Archive for 'twitter'

Sometime imitation is more than flattery, it’s good strategy

Published by Ben Kepes on July 11, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, Strategy and Web x.0.

Much talk of late has centred around the difficulties that Twitter has had scaling its infrastructure. Given the vacuum left by the regular and annoying downtime that Twitter faces, people have been discussing the alternatives - many a new entrant has launched, claiming new and exciting features that makes their offering that little bit more compelling than Twitter itself.

For a service like microblogging however, that is quite a slim offering (albeit with a big infrastructural scaling requirement), the maxim Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) springs to mind. Microblogging isn’t (no matter what Scoble says) a revolution of the highest order - it’s a nice little service offering that people will use (and use heavily) but one in which reliability is the preeminent requirement.

As the incumbent and originators of the genre the users of Twitter have grown accustomed to the way it works, they have no real qualms about it’s functionality (other than the dysfunctionality of it’s lack of reliability), as such the best strategy for a player wanting to walk into the Twitter vacuum is to provide an offering that is almost indistinguishable from Twitter, with two major exceptions;

  • It is designed from the ground up to be scalable, thus avoiding the problems that have plagued Twitter
  • It encourages, welcomes, and facilitates users bringing their twitter discussions directly into it - people don’t want pain when changing a service, reducing the stickiness that glues users to services is key to having them shift

So who will it be? This week identi.ca looks a likely candidate but only time will tell…

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Pay for Twitter? Like hell!

Published by Ben Kepes on May 28, 2008 in Design, IT, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0.

Over on Gigaom there is a post ranting on about the problems Twitter faces. Om tells us that the Twitter issues are caused by basic architectural flaws (not my area but difficult to argue against this one). Om explains the problem using Robert Scoble as an example;

to put Scoble and his Tweets in context, let’s assume for a minute that he always has 25,000 followers and he sent them 12,000 updates which are all 140 characters long, the maximum size allowed by Twitter. Again, hypothetically speaking, assuming each update is 100 bytes, then 12,000 updates generated used up 30 GB of data. (12000 updates * 100 bytes)* 25,000 = 30000000000 (30 GB)

Om then decides the best way to solve this issue is for Twitter to move to a freemium model where they charge heavy users - Om suggests that;

Twitter should charge Scoble, Leo, [Om], Michael Arrington and anyone else who has more than 100 friends and followers. How about something simple? $10 a month for 1,000 subscribers. 25,000 subscribers means someone like Scoble should be paying them around $250 a month

Let’s take it a step further. Twitter should limit people to 500 free messages a month. Any more should come in a bucket of, say, 1,000 messages for $10. Businesses like Comcast that want to use the service for commercial reasons should pay for the service, and so should startups like Summize, which want to build their businesses based on Twitter’s API

Let’s look at this - how many people have more than 100 followers - I’m guessing around half of Twitter’s users. Of those half I’d suggest that a significant number are accumulating followers for no other reason than that they can. Slap a heavy user charge on them and they’ll quickly start culling lower value (and spam) followers from their group.

So the pool of potential paying customers is reducing all the time. Say we’re now left with 30% of original users. How many of them really consider Twitter anything more than a fun toy? Maybe a third - down to 10% already. And here it gets interesting - 10% of users need to pay for the design and build of a truly scalable messaging service - while 90% of users come in on their shirt tails.

Nope - freemium isn’t the answer for Twitter Om - face it - Twitter signals a bubble - and sure I use it, but I wouldn’t invest in it nor pay to use it - that’s the real problem, not architecture.

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Twitter’s ability to lubricate communication…

Published by Ben Kepes on May 1, 2008 in Collaboration, Efficiency, IT and Web x.0.

A buddy and I have an ongoing argument about Twitter - he sees it as a waste of time, akin to passing notes back at school.

I on the other hand see it being a valuable communication facilitator - case in point an experience this afternoon.

A software vendor is in the process of discussing the development plans of a large platform player - nothing too interesting there. It seems however that the platform player has been a little recalcitrant in getting back to said vendor. Here’s where twitter comes in, the issue isn’t something one would blog about, neither is it one that one would send an email about. It is however just the issue that one would post a short, sweet tweet about.

That tweet, in essence a little bit complaining, a little bit despondent, was noticed by a number of people connected directly and indirectly with the platform player - hey presto - moves underway to resolve the issue before it becomes anymore of an issue - problem circumvented, communication facilitated.

Twitter does have a purpose!

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The new ego build 2.0… Geo-location on Twitter

Published by Ben Kepes on April 30, 2008 in Web x.0.

I’ve been playing on twitter a bit recently - I find it quite an interesting little tool: quicker and easier than blogging and nuanced differently from e-mail.

A recent development which to put it bluntly, does my head in, is geo-location. It seems a flash new startup (with about as much chance of building a monetizable business as my left big toe) brightkite offers a geo-location twitter mashup.

One user in particular (and as tempting as it is I’ll not name them) seems to delight in sending positional updates every five minutes. Now call me a sceptic but I have two thoughts here;

  • If he were truly famous, he’d be trying to hide and remain incognito
  • If he’s not it’s akin to walking around with a sandwich board saying “paparazzi come here”

The saying that comes to mind (not really analogous but you’ll get the drift) is “don’t be modest, you’re not that good”, come on guys attention seeking is just sooooo 1.0

So as my contribution to the high-level conversation that is twitter geo-location, here follows a recent exchange between me and Julian;

benkepes benkepes @Julian101 i’m sitting in my study watching a southerly roll in - which could be a lie or the truth and frankly… who cares 9 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to Julian101 Icon_star_empty Icon_trash
Julian101 Julian101 @benkepes Agree… who cares if we know they’re taking a poo.. 10 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to benkepes Icon_star_empty