Twitter and Friendster Parallels
One eye-roller of Internet assumptions for me is that ’social networks are transient’. That they are in some way faddish, which is a complete load of shit.
What does kill companies, is poor service. One of the most basic tenets of a web service is being up.
Friendster’s US market success was killed by its inability to stay up. Not because of MySpace’s innovation, not because people change social networks like underwear and not because of any other reason. Quite simply, people couldn’t login to the service and so were forced to go someplace else to express themselves.
Twitter is at a very similar juncture in its own life. In fact, you can probably nail today’s close of a $15m round of capital that was extremely competitive to the time when Friendster raised a similar amount from Kleiner Perkins and shunned a $30m acquisition offer from Google.
A quick sidenote: Friendster were actually smart to knock back the $30m offer as the company is actually worth multiples more and has a huge following in Asia, not that anyone in America cares.
Anyway, Friendster at the time, was down constantly and you can’t get smarter money than Kleiner and really fixing the outages is just a matter of throwing more money and servers at the problem. Yeah right.
Remind you of another company?
Twitter are extremely vulnerable right now. They have demonstrated an interest in a sizable but still small early userbase and I believe their core micro-blogging status update usage has morphed into multiple other things. But no one is going to stick around if the service isn’t up.
Their API both helps and hinders. Helps because their partners and app developers simply want the core service to be up and changing is a pain in the arse. But not being available is an even bigger pain in the arse.
My guess is that one of Twitter’s main app developers creates an alternate platform that shadows the main one and overtime they simply become the primary option. Twitter has less than a year to solve their problems before the horse bolts. And that’s not an easy proposition with the employees who will be tasked with the problem either having started very recently or yet to be hired.
