Jun 19

Written by: Jason Kergosien
6/19/2008 7:56 AM

I admit when I'm the last one to the boat.  I recently started exploring some social networking tools.  For the longest time, I avoided them simply because I did not see the value for me individually or the opportunity for my business.  Early on, they seemed like gimicks that would not likely last.  (man, I sound old!)

When several friends and colleagues started promoting their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, I decided to look into it again. Twitter has been fun, but it raised some questions in my mind.  Thus the purpose for this blog post.


Unavailable

Since I've been using Twitter (let's say 2 months), it has been unavailable easily a dozen times.  The site has obviously come crashing head on into growing pains.  So where does the problem lie?  Scalability with the servers, software architecture, limitations with the underlying programming language?  I prefer to look at it from a different approach: resource utilization.




There were some new followers to my Twitter account, and when I reviewed some, I found something that made no sense.  Now I'm new to this, so I may be way off, but what value is it to the end users to have this:



So, there's obviously some value to ringernation to have 100K follows, but regardless of the value, he must be sucking resources when he reads those twitters. In the law of diminishing returns, once you get to this level, what quality of networking is there?  If it is simply a way to promote yourself or your web site (as ringertnation has done), then IMHO, it devalues the social tool we're using.

So what would I say to Twitter? 

1. Put a cap on the number of followings
   
2. When prompted for to read twitters, pull up to a fixed number of posts (say 50 or 100)
3. Charge a premium to increase limits above - help pay for some infrastructure and would put an end to abuse.
   

I would post this on Twitter, but...  you guessed it!

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