With all the recent outages, it’s hard not to be at least a little suspicious.
After all, every social networking technology wants to be tight with Twitter. They want their updates pumped out over everything because everyone is clamoring to be that central hub of the social network on the Internet. They know full well that there is potentially Google-class money in being that hub. The truth is that Facebook is “close”, but they remind me a lot of how Yahoo was right before Google hit the ground…and Myspace…well, it reminds me a lot of AOL, Lycos, or Infoseek. Kludgy, but serves a specific purpose well (music vs. people lookup). Twitter is a very simple, non-cluttered-up technology that does a particular thing really well, and is easy to integrate with…so everyone will want to be the guy who lets you pump your updates over Twitter as well as display them on your own page.
The problem is, with all these “friends” wanting to flood Twitter, which is already fairly well flooded with various people’s meal updates, whether they tripped on a curb or not, or possibly a bit about the weather, it makes you wonder if the total income is enough to support the increases needed in infrastructure. Perhaps they need to find a way to be more decentralized, to offload more of the work to sites that integrate with Twitter…but on the other hand, that may skew their greatest potential economic strength, which is their ability to search through their messages and find people with similar interests.
Chances are, they’ll end up having to hook up with a wealthy sugar daddy. If they want to commit suicide, they’ll let that company be an Apple or a Microsoft closed shop. If they want to continue to roll, they’ll want to hook up with an outside partnership group that acts silently…but then again, there’s not a lot of value there if you do it like that. They definitely don’t want to make the same mistake as Myspace and let themselves be bought up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Google might be a good choice, or Facebook (though that would render it a closed shop too, most likely). It’s possible, too, that being bought by one of these well-known (and in many cases, notorious) companies to the typical Twitter user, a competing technology might be right there to suck up all the people who ditch it because they don’t trust that new ownership (as it was with Myspace).
Maybe they’ll be able to keep this thing up privately. Optimally, that would be the best for their success…and people will just have to deal with the occasional outage.