Now this is not just another rant post about server capabilities. This is a post about the reality of the current state of the internet. The fact is that products like Twitter are a part of our everyday lives. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Friendfeed, etc are all so deeply threaded into our lives that it would take a lot to remove them. However, most of them suck too.
If you think about Twitter, the value of being on Twitter never really came until your friends were on Twitter. The same thing has happened with Facebook, Friendfeed, and every other social network you can imagine. They don’t have any actual value until other people you know are using it. If you were the only person using Twitter, you’d quickly fine out that I’m completely correct: Twitter Sucks. A lot.
Twitter is very bad at what it does. It goes down constantly, doesn’t have many features, and has horrible customer service. I can’t even find the ‘Open a Ticket’ button on their help site to request assistance. If Twitter charged money for their service, I wouldn’t have even started using it (or would have at least requested a refund). I’m sure that I’m not the only person that feels this way. If you really examine Twitter at an application level, you would laugh.
And this isn’t just Twitter I’m talking about. There are many social networks out there that at an application level really suck. They don’t provide any sort of value to you unless there are a bunch of other people using it. They don’t have customer service, quality help pages, or minimal features. There is no reason I would even think of trying to copy them.
On the Internet, we need more companies that are good at what they do. We need companies that provide value without needing a million people to be on them. We need companies that people would pay money to use. Those are the companies that will survive the test of time. They might not be the companies that go viral, but they are the companies that will work.