Twitter is Doomed

Twitter is doomed.

You have to admit. As far as opening statements go, that one is pretty provocative. Granted, it's an overstatement for dramatic effect. To be fair, it should only read “Twitter may be doomed.”

Social networks are different from other forms of Internet-based communication or content. Most media rely on the entire Internet not one service. Email down? Use a different account. It's exactly the same. Same for IM. As long as everyone has access it doesn't matter which you use. Web content in general is usually available in more than one place. If Hulu is ill today, you can still watch your shows on CBS.com. MSNBC out of commission? Try CNN.com, NYTIMES.com or any of thousands of news outlets. And so on. There is a lot of redundancy in content and service and one is as good as another.

With social networks, the value is in the network. Not what it does but who it does. Facebook matters because of your Facebook Friends. If Facebook is down, then you can't update your network. You don't care if you update the world. It's the Facebook crowd that matters. Twitter is like this too.

Which brings us to why it is likely doomed. It's down all the time. As in several times a week. Stuff you want to Tweet (as posting to Twitter is called) is meant to go to your Twitter followers and they are waiting for it. There is no alternative since each social network is different. If all the networks was the same, folks would choose only one since you'd see the same content all the time. Even if you post the same thing on different social networks you are addressing different networks of people. Sure there is overlap but not complete and total. Everything else is interchangeable on the Internet since the Internet has 100% overlap. You can always find a substitute. With social networks it is unlikely that you will achieve anywhere that amount of overlap.

The final nail in the coffin comes about because, at some point in time, Twitter has to make money. If enough people get annoyed at the constant outages the value of Twitter over other social media will diminish to the point that the critical mass they need to attract advertisers will evaporate. No money means no Twitter. Twitter is (maybe) doomed.

In fact, the first to go will be the corporate types most likely to want to tie ads to their tweets. Once it reverts back to a handful of teenagers talking about what they had for lunch, no one (not even people who make lunch meat for teenagers) will be there to advertise.

The microblog format is clearly something people want. It just doesn't have to be Twitter. It could just as easily be Facebook, Google, or Microsoft. Which is exactly what it will be if Twitter doesn't deal with the downtime. Maybe Twitter is a victim of its own success. Could be that it is collapsing under the weight of the number of people who like it. None of that matters. People are not that forgiving. Either it gets fixed or Twitter is toast.

Get Off Of My Cloud

With Oracle's recent acquisitions of VirtualIron and Sun Microsystems, it would appear that they are positioning themselves as a player in the emerging area of cloud computing. Last year when I was buying IT resources, the concept of purchasing virtualized resources sounded really good. No more tying up money in data centers. No more hiring people to babysit hardware and software systems. Instead, investment and attention would all be focused on developing applications that created revenue for the company. Why not just buy hunks of processor, memory, disk and bandwidth from someone whose job it was to provide infrastructure? They make money and I don't have to tie up precious capital in hardware that goes obsolete. The nice thing about applications is that they are forever. Hardware, on the other hand, is like a car – it starts to depreciate the minute it leaves the showroom.

A funny thing happen on the way to the cloud though. I began to worry about privacy and long term viability. Some data is so valuable that you don't want anyone taking a peak at it. Intellectual property records, social security numbers, patient data, and the like can't be trusted to anyone but yourself. This is not the same as Saleforce.com type data. If my data was sitting on someone's SAN, how could I be sure no one messed with it? When I rented a server that was pretty easy. I could look at the server, check out the storage, and see what the logs told me myself. Fairly basic protections could go a long way towards making me feel secure.

The public cloud however provides none of that. You know practically nothing about the security of the systems. Amazon S3 is a great idea until you realize that you are handing your data over to Amazon with only their reassurances that everything will be alright. You can't see or touch their gear because it's in the cloud somewhere. Given the proclivity of large companies to misuse data and ignore privacy, it seems foolish to give it over to a faceless cloud.

Even if you assume the best, a public cloud requires a level of trust in the provider that is unknown in recent memory and perhaps unprecedented. Do you really trust Google with your data? Do you think they will always make decisions that are in your interest and not there's? Of course not.

And what happens when the cloud evaporates one day? We've seen large numbers of online applications disappear in the recession. What makes us think that you cloud provider, especially the smaller ones, won't join them. Remember the Storage Service Provider fiasco when SSP when boom in the Internet bust? What will you do if your cloud providers goes belly up? Replacing an ISP or even a rented server is fairly easy. You find another one. Can you find another cloud to sit on quickly? And can you adapt your applications to the new cloud in time?

Note that I said “public cloud”. Building your own cloud is fundamentally different. It's just another form of cost effective architecture. That's where I think Oracle will go with all this. Given Sun's ability to deliver a data center in a cargo container, coupled with VirtualIron's software and Oracle applications, they will be able to deploy an entire private cloud to your doorstep. I envision a tractor trailer pulling up and leaving a cargo container with a data center in my back yard. One can dream can't one.

Cloud technology has a lot of advantages. That's been talked about ad nausem. You get many of those advantages even if you own it. A private cloud allows you to have the benefits of a virtualized environment without the privacy and security problems. Public clouds are risky. They might be inevitable but don't get your heads into the clouds lightly.

All The Small Things

It's no surprise that applications have gotten huge. Software is like a gas – expands to fit the volume and disk volume is getting bigger and cheaper.

Take a look at a typical PC game. It likely comes on a DVD because it is several gigabytes in size. The same is true for operating systems and productivity applications. And Linux geeks, don't think it's any better for you. A decent distro with a good GUI such as Ubuntu can still take up gigabytes of disk space. If you are sitting there smug and thinking that it's not true because you use on-line apps instead, think again. A quick look at Google Docs should dispel the notion that it is in some way small. Every day new “capabilities” pop up that not only add to the size of the Google apps, consume amazing amounts of memory and include features that nobody uses. At any given moment, my Firefox browser with a couple of tabs open eats up a half a gigabyte of memory. Sure, it's partly due to my own excess with extensions but without the extensions Firefox is just not that interesting. I know that disk storage has gotten stupid cheap but that's only a small part of it. These enormous apps consume RAM, processor time, and mind share.

The good news is that there are still a lot of great small applications that are easy on your computer resources and downright useful. I love apps like that. They do one thing, do it well, and cost very little if anything. Here's a couple of examples.

Fences

Fences organizes the icons on your desktop into little groups. You use the mouse to draw a “fence” around the icons and they are encased in a transparent box with a label (or without if you prefer). You can then move the icon group around, resize the fence, and change the arrangement of the icon. Organizing icons on a desktop is something most of us do anyway with no help from the OS. Fences makes it much easier and more attractive. It's free from StarDock. Huzzah for Fences!

RocketDock

A simple tool bar with a small footprint. RocketDock does what the Apple OS X Dock does but for Windows. It creates a highly configurable tool bar which makes it easy to add and remove applications and folders. It's free from Punk Software. Huzzah for RocketDock!

Cartouche

Cartouche is a nice, simple, matching game. You have a set of colored Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols that you match by symbol or color. When a match is made, the symbols disappear and the other symbols move to fill in the open area and new ones fill in at the top. Do this over and over until you run out of time. One can spend hours playing this game. It's free, written in Java - hence portable -, has a tiny foot print, and even a small child can understand how to play. Huzzah for Cartouche!

VirtuaWin

Virtual Desktop managers rarely work this well. I expect them to crash Explorer or themselves on a regular basis. That's not the case with VirtuaWin. It creates multiple desktops and has easy keyboard and GUI navigation between them. Unless you have multiple monitors or rarely do more than one thing at a time, it's indispensable. And its memory footprint? 960K with hour desktops. Huzzah for VirtuaWin.

Remember the Milk

An online service that combines simplicity with power. All it does is help manage tasks. Having your task list online means having it wherever you are. It doesn't try and cram too many features and sticks to a simple, clean interface. Huzzah for Remember the Milk.

There are, of course, many more. World of Goo, is an amazing game that is small by modern standards. Notepad++, a text editor that is a favorite of programmers everywhere, is another relatively small but amazingly useful program. And who can forget TrueCrypt, a top notch, open source, encryption program. All of these are low or no cost, do one thing amazingly well, and don't suck up massive amounts of system resources. In some ways that makes them old school but in a good way.

So, when you are feeling frustrated that your latest app took up half of your massive hard drive and requires you to go out and buy a new computer, remember that there are still a lot of really great but small applications. Look past the giant applications with feature overload for the simple ones that actually do what you want.