May the best product win?
This morning I was talking to Tris Hussey via Twitter, and we were musing about why some products succeed while competing products — even superior ones — fail. The specific context was Twitter versus Pownce versus Jaiku.
Note that he and I were having the discussion on Twitter, which, after some initial hesitations, has become one of my main avenues of online communication. (Read: insight, laughs, gossip, professional networking, etc.) Tris, being the early adopter he is, used all three services from the early days. But he says that Pownce and Jaiku have “fallen off [his] radar,” while he uses Twitter all the time.
This takes me back to discussions from earlier years about first-movers and second-movers. Google, it has often been pointed out, was one of seven search engines, and at the beginning it was hardly clear that it would morph into an industry mover of Microsoftian stature.
But in the case of Google, we can at least understand the basic rationale: the interface was (and is) simple and clear, the algorithms kept improving, and the company kept optimizing around search-based advertising. While I like Twitter — and note with pleasure that its stability has improved radically in the months since I started using it — it’s a little early to say it’s smart-like-Google in terms of design or corporate management.
But what Twitter does have is . . . a community. Fascinating, fun people like Tris Hussey and Erin Kotecki Vest and Kate Olson and Shawn Zehnder Lea and . . . well, thousands more — all of whom share their weighty or flighty or mundane thoughts throughout the day. It’s the water-cooler deluxe.
Is that enough to explain its success? I don’t know — but I’d love to hear what you think.
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I was at first very skeptical of Twitter but since I started using it, I am a true fan (read addict). I hardly ever visit Facebook anymore. Twitter gives me just the right level of tangential diversion that I need to get me through my day.
My main concern with Twitter is with their business model. I hate when I fall in love with a service with no commercial viability or future. The advertising model that we all know and love is destination based. You get enough traffic to a place, and you can make money selling ads. Twitter is placeless. If Twitter is Google-smart (or smarter), they will innovate a new revenue model to tap into their value. The model they come up with will be significant because it may solve the diseconomy of feed syndication where the originator is currently under-compensated in advertising based revenue.
Good points, Seth. Twitter’s business model has been the (much more than) $64,000 question for a while now. I’ll be very interested to see what happens. Maybe an acquisition by one of the biggies?
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