“It’s very possible with better engineering its architecture might have gone on for a few more years, but eventually it would have hit this wall, where there were too many people posting too many twits to too many followers. The scale of the system as conceived rises exponentially.”

So is the end of Twitter getting near? I hope not. Twitter I hope that you are listening and you better start taking things more seriously.
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Here’s my two cents.

For instance there are about 100m users of yahoo messenger and usually 2-3 of them talk at a time that means scalability of 300m conversations. On the other hand with 100m twitter users who usually send messages to 100-10,000 other users the scalability required is 10,000m to 10^6m I have never known any current architecture based on webservers to handle such a scale. So according to me Twitter was never meant to live. It is like a concept car that will never see production. Users of twitter don’t understand this and they don’t care.
They don’t know whats happening when the website is down. The sad part is that the best analysts claim that Twitter is a billion dollar company in one year of operations. There is an old saying before the days of when people understood permutation combinations. One peasant asked a king to give him rice equal to the total amount gotten by placing double the number of rice grains on a chess square than the previous square, starting with one rice grain. There are 8×8=64 squares. We seriously need to visit grade 7 mathematics.

I know of only one News/Messaging system that supports around 1 billion users sending messages to all 1 billion users each. Thats a scalability of 10^12m. It is not Web based but rather on a massively scalable serverless P2P architecture based. The team is soft spoken and when I last talked to them I was told that they don’t care about money or hype or fame but rather for just the passion of next generation global systems that will stand the test of worldwide use. Its called Mermaid News Mermaid

They have other softwares too but this post is about Twitter and Messaging. Once everyone comprehends basic mathematics that goes behind scalable algorithms they would go past the flashy screen and hype to actually want a system they can trust. To the analysts I would say it is easy to create a business plan, create a hype and raise $20m funding it is far more difficult to create something of use.

1) Download a Twitter client (Twitterific is what I use on Mac, Twiteroo is one client on Windows)
2) Set it to start automatically on startup
3) Don’t ignore Tweets coming in. This is conversation. Engage it

This comment is totally off the topic of the post but this is what I recommend to people who don’t get it. The pervasiveness of conversation is NOT going away. It’s silly to pretend that it can be ignored. Engage it instead and use it to your advantage.

I like to relate to you not as a caricature of your company or business, but as a human being – and that’s possible only when you let a bit of ‘human-ness’show in your online communication.

I blogged recently about this, in “Get Out There And BE Yourself”:
http://MoneyPowerWisdom.com/get-out-there-and-be-yourself/

All success
Dr.Mani

Frankly, marketing on twitter doesn’t bother me in the least as it’s wholly opt-in. Your twitterstream brings nothing to my party? I stop following. Simple. You can do or say whatever you like. I’ve seen “content” sources that are just as twitter-dumb as the most annoying marketer.

Tweet about whatever you like, but give me something to play with or you won’t be in my sandbox for long.

Tried to send a track back to this post of one I wrote recently talking about using Twitter for marketing. Going to link it here in case your interested.

http://www.sugarattack.com/2007/09/18/social-networking-marketing-why-you-should-care/

Also, it should be noted I found your site through Twitter (Chris Brogan’s tweet).

William

I think a company can use Twitter for marketing, but it is only a tool in the overall picture of social networking and media. I think I would talk to Gabe if I thought it was him on the other end of the Techmeme channel. This was a big reason I opted out of Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter channel. I was tired of getting nothing more than URL’s for every Truemor submission. I want to know what other stuff he is reading and interested in as well.

A company can be human on the Twitter channel. They can submit articles about their industry, their people, their products and even their competitors. As long as I connect with them in some way I’ll follow them. Now if it is a knitting company or yarn manufacturer, I would probably pass, but I’m sure in the knitting world, they could have a nice niche.

I would like to see more dialogue on this Aaron so I hope we get some more comments here.

I wrote more on this here:
http://www.sufficientthrust.com/how-to-find-10-new-clients-or-blog-readers-today-with-twitter/

There are services we sign up to and just take them as a pulse. Techmeme was a perfect example. And then there are times when someone wants our attention. Something out of the blue. Not just a normal thing. Something where you want us to take action.

If Gabe got on the Techmeme twitter feed and asked me (us) anything at all, would we even notice or answer? Not likely.

So, if the goal is to ping, fine. We can opt out. But if the goal is to keep us coming back for more, we’d better have a strategy for staying human.

Keep up the good work, Aaron.

GL

What you’re referring to is actually valid. I did not actually touch on that dynamic. More oversight than anything else. However, I think you’d agree with me on how many traditional marketing types are using Twitter, wouldn’t you?

You can use Twitter as a messaging channel, to an audience that does care about the message. Yes, you can also respond to people, but it does not have to be a full conversation. How often do you talk to the Techmeme or Wesmirch Twitter channel?