I have been hearing a great deal of discussion among my twitter friends. Almost everyone who uses the service regularly is tired of the outages.
A recent post by Mack Collier at The viral garden suggested that users would not be as frustrated if twitter had a public face or was transparent about the reasons behind these outages. It is true that transparency could probably help.
I have also heard talk of paying for twitter in exchange for better service. While I personally would consider paying for twitter, I am opposed to this idea. The problem is a fee, even one as low as $5 a month will discourage many from using twitter. In fact those with less than ten twitter friends would probably drop out all together.
At this point the service needs to grow and expand not lose users. But if twitter continues to have regular issues and crummy service those occasional users might drop out all together. I can understand someone with 700 followers continuing to use the service, but what about someone with 7 followers. Twitter needs to figure out a way to give better service without charging users or it will never survive and flourish.
Photo by: Southernpixel
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Twitter must improve
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1 comment:
Good point Hannah, that's the problem with setting a price on Twitter, because the site isn't what's worth paying for, but the interaction with the people I follow and that follow me. If a $5 fee means I lose half the people I am following, it's not worth the cost.
I think Twitter will eventually get the outages fixed, the userbase will expand significantly, then Twitter will explore monetization options.
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