Seeing the upside (and lighter side) to Twitter being down
There’s been a lot of discussion of late whether Twitter’s frequent outages over the last few months will cause people to abandon the popular micro-blogging service, and whether newcomer Friendfeed is positioned to swallow up its audience.
I don’t think either will happen, at least not in the short term. Twitter is obviously scrambling to get things right – or at least stable – on the technical and infrastructure side, and is smartly turning off some features while keeping the lights and basic services of the site on. It’s also responding to its audience much more quickly and vocally than it was earlier this year, all of which says good things about Twitter’s ability to be responsive to its large and growing member base.
Twitter’s in such an interesting place. It’s sort of at the very verge of being well known – at least among Internet power users – but you’re still more than likely to get blank stares if you mention it to a non-geek group.
Internet memes as a whole are just hitting pop culture mass this year, as The Daily Show and South Park (see below) satirize things like Leave Britney Alone! and Chocolate Rain to large scale television audiences.
I think we’ll know that Twitter has reached the same scale when a character on a sitcom can mention blasting a message to his or her Twitter followers while knowing that most watching will get the reference.
In the meantime, the Twitter satire market, while nascent, is gearing up. Top 5 Things To Do When Twitter is down? is pretty funny stuff…
In any event, I believe that Twitter will make it through its growing pains to get to the other side of being made fun of – and made reference to – by the best and brightest.
