As Twitter Regains Footing, Competitors' Growth Stalls

Over the last few months, Twitter's challenges have been well documented, here and elsewhere. Between issues with uptime, occasional data loss, a reduced feature set, and a difficult relationship with its developer community, the microblogging service frustrated many users to the point they were seeking out alternatives - from Plurk, to Identi.ca, Rejaw and FriendFeed. But more recently, as the service has all but eliminated downtime, and put the "Fail Whale" on the Endangered Species list (See: Pingdom's Twitter analysis), it looks like competitive services are losing momentum, and some are bleeding visitors, if Web visit tracker statistics are to be believed.


Twitter.com's Growth Has Returned, According to Compete.com
According to Compete.com, Twitter saw more than 2.6 million visitors in the month of August, a 500% increase over its December 2007 number, representing a 17.7% increase month over month. The high level of growth since June for Twitter followed a two-month near plateau from April to June, when the service's struggles were at their peak.


Compete.com Shows Twitter's Competitors Have Stalled
In the same time period, from July to August:

• Identi.ca fell more than 58%, to 61 thousand visitors, down from more than 140 thousand the prior month.
• Plurk.com fell to less than 250 thousand visitors, down 7.5% month over month, and down 30 percent from the site's peak, in June.
• FriendFeed.com visits were flat from July to August, decreasing just under 1 percent, to more than 500 thousand visitors.

(All data from Compete.com)


Compete.com Velocity Shows Twitter Extending Its Lead
I can't claim I was an extremely "early" adopter of Twitter, and at times, I haven't been too fond of the service compared to other sites, but when it comes to status updates and "what you are doing", there really is only one game in town, one that's synonymous with the concept of microblogging - Twitter, thanks to it being first on the scene, first to amass a significant user base, and being tied in to other services, like Facebook and FriendFeed.. When Twitter had months of instability, outages, and a reduced feature set, its users didn't make the mass migration to other services that many had expected. And while they're still wrapping their arms around a business model, as services like Yammer claim to have gotten to the financial promised land first, Twitter has got the brand recognition and the massive user base that no other service can claim.

On Saturday, I wrote to Chris Baskind on FriendFeed, regarding Twitter.

"We have huge expectations and therefore, huge frustrations. The site has so much potential, and realistically, they have already won the microblogging battle, so we want them to be great!"

Twitter has the potential to be the conduit for the SMS and text messaging generation to social media. Twitter has already proven to be a great option for news updates, alerts to emergencies, and for using keywords to gauge the temperature of tens of thousands at once. And for anybody looking to the smaller services like Plurk, Rejaw, or Identi.ca, even if those services have incrementally better features or a stronger UI, they would have to expect a smaller user base, becoming an increasingly quiet echo chamber.

Barring disaster or bankruptcy, Twitter's leadership should continue. I've seen increasing examples of late where the site has become more mainstream. Those looking to alternative microblogging services may have had the time to hit at Twitter's weaknesses pass them by, as the site has nearly eliminated downtime, and started again on the growth curve, when others have stalled or seen user traffic decimated.

There is No Social Media Overload

Every day, there are more and more great services to investigate in the world of social media. Each one breaks new ground in terms of features, focus or user interface. There are many different sites that target general social networking, some are for business, some are for dating, some are for microblogging, and others for service aggregation. And there will be many more. While some are calling for a pause in the innovation, somewhat fatigued by the implied redundancy or overwhelmed by chasing down comments and conversations in new places, it's worth noting there's time in the day to manage a good number of sites, and not all the winners have yet been crowned.

To have a full deck of social media tools, you essentially need the following:

• 1 or more blogs that you manage.
• 1 or more accounts on an RSS feed reader.
• 1 or more microblogging identities.
• 1 or more accounts on a business networking tool.
• 1 or more accounts on a social network.
• 1 or more accounts on a service aggregator or lifestream.
  

(Also helpful: A social bookmarking site, online photo site, music recommendation service, etc.)

For me, this means I blog here, use Google Reader, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and FriendFeed as my core applications for each category. But below these headliners are others.

For RSS, I also use Shyftr and liked AssetBar before it went away. I've tried Bloglines, FeedEachOther and NewsGator as well. There are also tools that interact with RSS, like Toluu, which helps you find feeds your friends like and integrates with Google Reader, and the sites dedicated to finding the most shared items in Google Reader, like ReadBurner, RSSMeme and Feedheads. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to ReadBurner)

For microblogging, beyond Twitter, you have Identi.ca, Plurk, and now, Rejaw. I'm signed up at each, but use Twitter primarily, copying posts to Identi.ca, via Posty. I need to check out Rejaw more, but am no expert.

For business networking, there's also Plaxo, which has morphed into a lifestreaming application.

For social networking, many still use MySpace, or Friendster, but Facebook has the momentum and the development on its side. Orkut never got the traction expected.

As for lifestreaming and aggregation, I am absolutely overweighted here, and I enjoy it. Justin Korn referred to it as "Super Kickass Social Network Following Power", but if you're interested, it's fairly easy to be engaged on sites like FriendFeed, Social Median and Strands all at once, like I'm trying to do.

I like FriendFeed because it easily pulls in my activity from around the Web and has a sharp community with good conversations and hiding. I like Social Median because it lets me just see news and posts on topics I pick or from people I follow. I like Strands because it has similar elements to FriendFeed, but more filtering and some good potential. I also know it can continue to improve because it’s early. Just in the last 36 hours, I've gone from being a nothing on Strands to having more than 100 people whom I can interact with.

Below this crust of leaders, you also have smaller sites like Yokway and LetsProve, where I'm registered, but haven't done much of late. FriendBinder doesn't seem to have taken off either, and BlogRize, though interesting, got quiet fast, and seems to have gone away, as did Mergelab. The truth is that we don't know which sites are going to win, and it makes sense to be registered everywhere and active on those places where you find the best community and the best content.

Of course, just because I sign up for something, or find something, doesn't mean that you're obligated to try it out. Not all sites are for everyone. But I'm far from being overloaded with Social Media. You just have to find balance, time, and keep remembering there is no quota and you don't have to read everything. Contrary to some belief, I'm not constantly on each site. I just read quickly, decide quickly and respond quickly. None of these sites is a real big time sink, unless you force yourself to read everything. It's easier to let your friends decide the best pieces, and for you to rely on search tools to get the rest, whether it be through Twitter Search, or pre-determined Google blog searches.

The only way you get social media overload is if you don't manage it well, just like you can get RSS overload or e-mail overload, or so I've heard. Even as there are more services to engage with, the number of hours you have to work with them is still the same. So do check out as many as you think have potential, and stick with the ones that offer you the community you're looking for, the engagement you need, and the best feature set. You'll find your niche.

See Also:

• Relax, Bloggers: Nobody Is Keeping Score, and There's No Quota.
• My Social Media Consumption Workflow
• Continuous Parallel Attention: My New Reality

Can Microblogs Just Talk To Each Other?

Guest Post By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Twitter has had a bad few days. After a few weeks of wonderful stability, we started to see some Fail Whales. Then people started losing followers and subscriptions. Because of this, even more people are moving to alternative micro-blogging services like Identi.ca. Of course there have been several requests for a Twitter friend importer. I think people are getting caught up in the problem and not thinking about the best solution. Previously, I mentioned that Twitter was at the crossroads. In that post I started thinking about a possible solution:

It is now late May and they are just admitting that they have infrastructure problems. Obviously, there are the redundancy and replication issues that can be solved with known techniques. The realtime API needs to be using a replicated database and not affect the main database. This is the part that is concerning me the most as it should have been obvious some time ago.

Another post appeared from Dave Winer where he mentioned that we are inching toward federation.

Right now, today I'm using an approximation to the ideal system. I try to enter my original post on FriendFeed, then I have an agent script running on one of my machines that routes it to Twitter and Identi.ca, with a pointer to the discussion thread on FriendFeed, shortened by bit.ly.

Obviously, this is not a good solution to the Twitter problem either. There are also multi-posting services like Ping.fm and Posty which allow a user to update each of their micro-blogging services with the same message. So, with one click you can update Twitter, Identi.ca, Pownce, Jaiku and Plurk. While that sounds really cool, they only provide one-way updates. Tools like Twhirl are starting to allow posting and retrieving of tweets and dents in one application. This gets a little better, but you still have multiple accounts to deal with.

Federated Microblogging

Federation is the real answer. What does federation do and why is it different from Twitter creating a distributed architecture? A distributed architecture means you have various pieces of the application sitting on different servers. Typically, several parts are replicated or redundant and there are various load balancing devices thrown in to complete the architecture. I am not going to go into tons of detail as books have been written about distributed architectures.

Federation is different from distributed in one simple sense. Federation requires a full copy of the entire system. Federation is the cooperation between various systems to act as one. Wikipedia has a good description of a federated database system.

A federated database system is a type of meta-database management system (DBMS) which transparently integrates multiple autonomous database systems into a single federated database. The constituent databases are interconnected via a computer network, and may be geographically decentralized. Since the constituent database systems remain autonomous, a federated database system is a contrastable alternative to the (sometimes daunting) task of merging together several disparate databases.

If you replace all of the database and database system terminology with microblogging and microblogging system you will understand a federated system. So, how does this help Twitter? It does not, at least not directly. By having a federated system, people can move to Identi.ca or the next clone that appears and not lose their followers. If you think about the concepts of email, you will understand how the federated system would work. My account in the federated system would be robdiana@identi.ca. A Twitter user could reply from within Twitter directly to me (robdiana@identi.ca) and I would receive it in whatever client application I had. I could also follow Twitter users, Pownce users or any other microblogging user. By enabling people to communicate across platforms would mean that the server load would be spread across various services, thus decreasing the amount of traffic on Twitter directly.

The one part of the federation that is missing is the routing between servers. This can be accomplished by following the DNS model. A local DNS server has a reference to its parent or master server. This allows new servers to be built and their location and IP address propagated to other servers. This is a very effective solution and it has worked for several years.

Because Twitter and Identi.ca follow the same API, they could act as the root servers in the system. The other option to the Twitter API is the XMPP protocol, which Twitter is using for their realtime API. The protocol choice is important because a federated system requires that all of the systems speak the same language. A federated system would also require a different client application than we have now. As I mentioned earlier, Twhirl fully supports Identi.ca and Twitter. However you are dealing with two different accounts. How cool would it be if you had one microblogging client to chat with people on any service?