Scoble vs the Twitter Guys

When I last saw Scoble yesterday, he was headed over to meet with Twitter's Evan Williams to bury the virtual hatchet over their recent tiff. The Twitter guys had complained that people like Robert, with 25,000 followers were abusing Twitter. It had been built for low-traffic purposes and every time Robert posted, which is quite often, Twitter was obliged to distribute his post mre than 25,000 times. Good point.

Except the most enduring products rarely stay confined to their original intent. I am pretty certain that Alexander Graham Bell had no idea that his invention would lead to people watching YouTube on an iPhone. FaceBook began nt so very long ago as a campus dating/friending network.

Then there's the Scobleizer view.As perhaps the most prolific contributor of social media content in the world his curiose inclination to play with and talk about all new tech innovations make him a huge influencer of new products. There is no question that Scoble has brought Twitter thousands, probably 10s of thousands of users. Robert argues that Twitter should build products to suit the needs of its most influential customers, not kvetch publically about them. And he has a pretty good case. I'm a big advocate of companies listening to their customers, and Scoble is among their very best customers.

Except that the service is free. And every time Scoble posts, which is quite often, Twitter is obliged to distribute his posts more than 25,000 times. If Scoble posts, 100 times in a day that's 2,500,000 free deliveries for Robert at twitter's expense.

I think just about everyone close to the issue at this time sees the solution in some form of tiered structure. The average Twitter user, Biz Stone told me in an April GNTV interview, has ten followers, follow 10 people and posts about three times daily That would be the free service and what most Twitter users are happy to have for free. For those of us who use it more we would pay, by the post, by the minth or in some measurable way. In my interview with Biz, he talked about making it a utility and this is pretty much how phone and cable companies structure usage.

In fact, Om Malik has suggested the same in a thoughtful post on this subject. Except that under Om's plan, Scoble would pay for the 25,000 followers he has, which seems to me to be like charging email users for receiving spam. I'd rather see the charges tiered to usage--the number of peope  follow, the number of times I post, etc.

I think most of us who have become ardent in our Twitter usage are ready to pay, except for on very big catch: Like Biz said in our interview. Before Twitter can charge for usage, it has to become a consistantly reliable service, at least as reliable as a hpone or cable carrier.

Comments

[Tom Nixon]

Hi Shel, I don't think charging premium users would help Twitter's reliability. They have a lot of cash in the bank already and throwing more money at the problem won't fix it. What they need is time to get the architecture right so that it can scale and become reliable.

That said, my personal view is the same as Dave Winer in that Twitter is heading towards becoming a vital piece of communications infrastructure on the Internet and as such would work much better as decentralised system in the same way as email and DNS without a single point of failure.

[shel israel]

Tom,
I did not intend to imply that charging would fix it. Like Om, I think that charging gives them a viable business model and will slow down the accelerated usage. I was simply saying that they cannot charge until they fix the service.

[shel israel]

Tom,
I didn't want the post to go too long, but there are some other options to consider. Putting a freeze on new users; putting caps on followers or tweets. I would rather pay for it and use revenue to slow growth.

-S.

[Erick Herring]

Twitter has value only insofar as they have users. Since the switching (away) cost to users for what is, in essence, an extremely unreliable pub/sub queue for text messages, are almost nil, I find it laughable that they could charge.

Half a dozen alternate approaches, none of which have the single point of failure/scaling that plagues Twitter, are being mooted right now (as Tom alludes to, above).

Which reduces Twitters value to a simple, single point: they exist. Alternatives do not, yet, but they will quickly spring up, a la IRC and Usenet, if Twitter taxes its users monetarily or (sufficiently) in aggravation at reliability.

What would it take to be a "fast follower" of Twitter? Not much, I think. Twitter would be well advised to stop worrying about people "abusing" their system and instead focus on getting their systems to Internet-scale and rock-solid stability.

Then they might have a chance to figure out a business model that is sustainable in some way.

[Mathew Patterson]

@erick Since the switching (away) cost to users for what is, in essence, an extremely unreliable pub/sub queue for text messages, are almost nil

Erick, I think the real switching cost is the contact with those followers you have - the true value of Twitter is that everybody else is using Twitter.

There is a ton of other options out there already, but if your followers have to create a new account....are they going to do that for you?

Attention is worth a lot, and if Twitter can facilitate your fans giving you that attention, people will be willing to pay for it.

[Ezra Butler]

My only issue with the concept of requesting Scoble to pay (even with a stable system) is that Scoble (theoretically) does not ask people to follow him, they follow by their own volition.
The real ones who should be blamed are the spammers that simply "follow" 30,000 people in two days. That is probably adding a larger steady load than Scoble's X tweets/day.
Perhaps there should be a ratio - that you cannot follow more than 200% of the amount of people who follow you. (Scoble would still be able to keep his 2.4 million followers, but he will never use up his ratio.)

[Douglas Karr]

Shel,

I think you uncovered a strong revenue model for Twitter. What if Twitter charged me a $1 a month to follow a 'Premium' user such as Robert ? It's a very low cost and would pay for those 2.5 million Tweets quite easily with $25k a month in revenue. They could probably even split the revenue with Scoble.

Interesting.

Thanks for the balanced post on this. I wrote a similar comment on Robert's blog when he went off on them. I empathize with both parties.

Doug