Twitter: Super Star or Shooting Star?

Who knows whether five years from now Twitter will even exist; by then it may be only a historical footnote in Wikipedia.

Somehow I doubt it.  The reason Twitter’s future looks so bright is that it is very well-positioned on this, the very day that sad old General Motors finally sunk into bankruptcy. (On that score, check out the blog post by Michael Moore today called “Goodbye GM.”)

To help visualize Twitter’s virtually infinite set of business options at this point in its development, take a look at Steve Rubel’s brilliant mind map called “The Future of Twitter.” You only have to follow the lines emanating out from Twitter’s box a few paces in any direction to grasp the enormous range of options this young company has for growing into a superpower, the next Google.

As noted here recently, even Google’s founders admit that Twitter is kicking its butt in delivering real-time news. But, despite all of its early success, and its virtually infinite upside potential, Twitter will discover that the laws governing all businesses take no prisoners, and that the beaches of capitalism are littered with once-promising ships that crashed on these same rocks in both the distant and the recent past. (Mixing metaphors=fun.)

On a cautionary note, then, after my much rosier “The Twelve Ways Twitter Will Transform the Media Business” last week, allow me to voice my own Top Three pet peeves with the micro-blogging service as it currently is configured:

• The average “life” of a Tweet is about 20 to 30 seconds, max, as calculated by Thierry Lamouline at Smub. Of course, RT’ing (reTweeting) extends that life somewhat (though only at another 20-30 seconds per pop), so if your community of followers RT’s a Tweet, your reach will be proportionately greater, though never as large as it could be, if Twitter provided the means for transcending ephemerality. This leaves a lot of money on the table.
• There is no good way to find things on Twitter. Its in-house search tool sucks, pure and simple.
• The service fails way too often. I understand that it’s hard to maintain enough server capacity to handle the hockey stick growth Twitter is experiencing, but episodes like that on last Saturday, when clicking yielded nothing but the dreaded whale for hours, do not build confidence that Twitter’s IT team is at the top of its game.

None of these problems are deal-breakers. Twitter still has a gigantic lead on potential competitors, by virtue of its position on Rubel’s visualization map. But these issues do indicate that like many previous rising business stars, Twitter’s fate is hardly fixed in this ever-changing universe of ours.

If management does not address the three issues listed above (plus another half dozen I will raise in the weeks to come), today’s darling could easily turn into just another shooting star.