Twitter’s downtime sucks. It has gotten so bad that sites and services are devoted to telling users when Twitter is down, or allowing users to tweet while the service is down. Despite all of the problems with Twitter staying up, there are a couple reasons why the future of Twitter is pretty bright.
Twitter is Going Mainstream
Even though Duncan Riley called it the ‘Pending Sign of the Twitter Apocalypse‘, the fact that Internet Marketers are using Twitter is a sign that Twitter is going mainstream. There are of course problems with Twitter going mainstream, particularly spam, but on the positive side Twitter going mainstream means that there will be more users, and more users means that there will be more ways to utilize the data that Twitter creates from its users.
Twitter is Fixing Their Downtime
It’s about time, but Twitter is finally doing something to fix their constant downtime by hiring Pivotal Labs, a “quiet but impressive groups of big-gun, for-hire developers“. Since the root of Twitter’s downtime has to do with how it was designed, a complete rebuilding of the platform should alleviate much of the problems Twitter is currently having.
Twitter is Being Used in New Ways
While Twitter is typically used to describe what one is doing, the various uses of Twitter are constantly expanding. Recently a semi-formal debate between an Obama and McCain surrogate took place on Twitter. There have also been several displays of companies using Twitter to keep up to date with what their customers are doing. Just the other day I tweeted about not being able to try out the Feedly beta and within six minutes I received a reply from their team telling me it’d be ready in the next couple of days.
If all of these trends stay constant the future of Twitter is looking pretty good, even with competition from Pownce, Tumblr, and in the near future recently acquired Jaiku. Honestly though, who would have though a service that has a character limit of 140 characters would be so popular?