Twitter is magic!
September 25th, 2008As many, I have become a Twitter lover that as a user I find so powerful and as an entrepreneur so full of potential. But I don’t mean here to praise the service, let alone the team behind it.
When I say that there is something magic about Twitter, I really mean something I don’t get that makes the harshest critics and loudest voices show leniency and forgiveness.
I had forgotten about Twitter’s demise from a few months ago up until today when I got this when I tried to access the site:
I found it incredible that Twitter survived months of flacky service at a time when users tend to have very low attention span and media critics are unforgiving. Instead of moving on and away, users started getting organized to try to help Twitter fix its problems, while investors completed a second round of investment for the start-up.
Now, a few months later, Twitter doesn’t seem to have worked out the simple workflow and procedure to follow when the site is down. This would be acceptable if the site were in Private Beta but not so much when it has a couple of millions of regular users. It also shows quite a bit of cockiness on the part of the Twitter team to disregard such basic user expectations and industry standards.
This is where I find Twitter to be magic, the same way I find card tricks I don’t understand to be magic: I have to assume that the disregard that Twitter has for some basic business rules, that most have already figured out, is probably the magic ingredient in their recipe. I don’t mean to say “do everything wrong and you’ll succeed” or that these very business rules don’t apply to them, but rather that it is by abstracting itself from business-as-usual patterns, Twitter managed to stumble on something new and interesting, so interesting that it prompts a very different reaction from people than one would expect.
So kudos to Twitter and the Twitter team for not going by the book.
As I finish writing this post, Twitter is back on. Gotta go see what I missed…