Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Yesterday Twitter had one of its periodic outages — which seem to be coming less often than a few months ago, but which still happen too often. There’s even a whole genre of jokes about what people say when Twitter is down.

But seriously, Twitter user TheGhost summed it up perfectly:

“Bad news: Twitter is down. Good news: Users *need* it back up. Bad news: Eventually, users *won’t* need it back up.”

It’s a problem inherent in any service that harnesses the social power of the network effect: What happens when the physical network can’t keep up with the social links that have formed on top of it?

A social network like Twitter isn’t about the technology. The networking gear is there as an enabling mechanism. In fact, it has often been remarked that Twitter’s technology isn’t even that fancy. But the social aspect is what makes a social network work.

Regular Twitter users know that its success traces back to the human connections you form while you use it. But you can’t keep up those connections (read: “get your social fix”) if the network won’t let you.

We Twitter users keep using the service because we’re invested in it — we have many social connections on the network that would be tedious to recreate elsewhere. And most of the time, it works just fine. But at some point, if the user experience is bad enough — or simply unpredictable enough — Twitter’s audience will abandon ship, especially if a competitor comes along with something better.

Ask Compuserve.

[An ironic note, minutes later: As I often do, once I finished this post I went over the Twitter to point the folks there toward it. But Twitter . . . was down.]

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UPDATE, Thursday morning – Here are more thoughts about Twitter and its outages:

• From Twitter itself, a graph of this week’s outages. Give ‘em credit for admitting that they’re not sure where the outages are coming from.
• Tris Hussey: Twitter’s problems, Pownce’s gain or FriendFeed’s opportunity?
• Jeremiah Owyang: Before you break up with Twitter . . .
• Chris Brogan: Twitter Bashing - A Popular Sport Lately. Like Tris, Chris muses on the possibilities of FriendFeed.

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My previous posts about Twitter:

• May the best product win?
• YMMV.
• The Twitter curmudgeon.
• Twitter’s versatility, LinkedIn’s utility, Facebook’s valuation, and other social networking tidbits.
• I think I broke Twitter.

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