Twitter is
getting more and more popular all over the world. However, it faces
scaling issues in handling high bandwidth of traffic as the number of
users turns into millions. It
suffers from poor architechtural design and lack of business model.
Twitter is in great danger of loosing the loyalty of its fans.
The site takes a long time to load, its features are either slow or
permanently don't work. Tweet updates get lost and due to the site's
downtime, its third party applications don't work either. Furthermore,
there is no clear solution yet on how they will monetize the site.
Almost two
years since it was officially launched, rumors say, it hasn’t yet
earned its
first penny. Anyone could
kill a great idea just like the copy cat MySpace beating Friendster
while
Twitter is suffering from downtime issues and financial problems.
Poor Architechtural Design
Like many web 2.0 startups, early design
decisions from Twitter's web framework worked well for small number of
users. As the
number of users grow, scaling the site is always the main priority to
make it seamlessly work and deliver to millions of users. Twitter,
itself, started to fail so often everytime they received a massive
spike of traffic. Early on, web darling Ruby on Rails was fingered for
the scaling problems, but Blaine Cook, Twitter's lead architect, held
Ruby blameless. Twitter is
having technical difficulties as their number of users grow. One thing
they failed to do is to prepare Twitter into the mainstream. It cannot
serve millions of users at this moment and they are working really hard
to solve this problem. Twitter was not able to scale at
the early stage and now that more and more people uses the site, the
problem is
harder to fix causing more downtime.
The Twitter application
itself is complex enough to scale. Reading and writing tweets in
database at the same time
from hundreds of thousands users is very complicated to handle just
like a
real time Internet Relay Chat application. Specially for a low budget
project
with limited hardwares. New Facebook chat feature as an example, which
scales to 70 million users, borrowed another $100 million, to add to
its previous funding of $360 million raised in the last six months for
more servers and to add new features on top of Facebook. Just imagine how much Facebook needed to expand, add more servers, and new features even though it has a decent stream of revenue from its banner ads space.
To speed up their
site with limited funding and servers, Twitter uses extensive data caching and spent a lot of time
trying other
people’s solutions that just almost seemed to work, but not quite.
Twitter kept their site so simple since it was first launched almost
two years ago. It allows them to focus on scaling the site and build
public API which is the best thing Twitter has done so far. Keeping the
service simple allowed developers to build on top of their
infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than
Twitter's website. For example, Twitterrific, which is a beautiful way
to use Twitter. A lot of people continually stream their tweets to all
their followers without going directly into Twitter's website.
Lack Of Business Model
Recently, Twitter has nailed down a $15 million second round
funding, bringing its total raise to around $20 million. This will give
them a boost to buy more servers and buy more time for the company to
figure out how they will monetize Twitter without resorting to
something cheap and obvious like banner ads across the site. Until now,
Twitter doesn’t have any ads showing up on across the site. One of the
main reasons
is that it is hard to figure out how to add relevant banner ads on
their site that can seamlessly connect to it's users without getting
annoyed from banner ads. Another reason is that 90% of Twitter’s traffic
source comes from
their public API. Their API is the most important thing Twitter has
done. It is
a huge reason for Twitter's huge growth. Developers were able to build
external
applications tools that provides better tweet experience. As a result,
Twitter
ends up as the protocol itself or the pipe providing the service that receives
millions of tweets
per day. That means, 90% of the tweets are done outside of Twitter’s
website. Making
it impossible to monetize the site in the traditional way of adding
commercial
ads across the site.
Another isssue is that Twitter started their site without showing
up any ads. People are getting used to a simple, neat, and elegent interface of Twitter's website. Adding up ads anytime soon might upset its users and leave the site.
Abuse
A lot of downtime problems occured because many people crawls the
site and adds everyone as friends.
Adding 9, 000 friends in one day can take down the site. By adding
9,000
friends, Twitter is also sending 9,000 confirmation emails. Also, another
abusive issue is the use of public API by third party applications who
continually crawls data from Twitter.
Following The Footsteps of Friendster
Friendster, one of the biggest disappointments in internet
history – was destined for greatness and compared to Google as the next big
thing on the internet, then became one of the business jokes in Silicon
Valley. Back in 2003, as Friendster suffers from frequent scaling
and downtime issues, MySpace stole the American audience.
Twitter on the other hand is on a familiar situation. Many people
started to adopt the Twitter lifestyle of posting tweets and getting
used in sending information to all their followers. A more
efficient and reliable Twitter clone website is possible with the
benefits
of learning from Twitter’s lack of business model and the best thing
that
Twitter has done – their public API. It's not surprising to see that Twitter
will
fail eventually and a new copy cat Twitter like website will kill a
great idea.
The Future of Twitter
It's interesting to see how Twitter will succeed their current
problems. It is also very interesting for many entrepreneurs and
developers to see how Twitter will engage their strategy in making
enough money to pay for all the bills. Under the radar, a lot of copy
cat Twitter like application starting to rise and gain popularity.
Local copy cats already rising from China and Japan which manages to
insert ads on their site. One thing that makes it hard to beat Twitter
is their already successful public API which gives them a big advantage
to all its competitors.
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