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Twitter Succeeds Because it Fails

Posted: September 4, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: blog | Tags: , | 9 Comments »

How can twitter be so popular and successful if it’s down all the time?

We base statements like this on the assumption that quality of a web application maps linearly to the application’s stability. This is obviously true for most sites most of the time, but things get interesting at the edge where rare, unpredictable failure actually enables more complex human interactions around the service.

Unlike e-mail, twitter etiquette doesn’t demand that you read or reply to every message from every person you follow (or who follows you). Combine that lightweight social touch with occasional technical issues and human communication patterns, and we start to see some interesting behavior.

Twitter’s lack of reliability as a platform allows us to use the technical failings to mask our own social imperfections. How often have you heard or said something like “I was sure I was following you” or “I must not have gotten that DM” or even “I think I tweeted that…”? Even just a small percent of users behaving this way changes the social expectations.

I’d love to construct an experiment to figure out whether this idea has merit, and if so, what the optimal amount of unavailable operations for social deniability is. Should 1 in 100 actions fail? 1 in 10,000? 1 in 1,000,000? Does it matter if any fail, as long as we believe that every so often failure occurs? (How often do things really get lost in the mail, anyway?)

It’s amusing to conceive of a system that succeeds socially because it often fails technically.

  • Michael leis

    Really interesting idea. Like a lot of folks, I’ve been thinking about intermittent/variable reward structures as a big reason why so many people are using social networks. I usually think about twitter like a slot machine (I think Kathy Sierra was the first person to point this out): your status update is a quarter, and the stream refreshing are like the tumblers. You don’t know whether you’ll get a large (@reply) reward, or a small one (just seeing updates of the people you follow). But what makes twitter different is that you never lose. That’s where your post gets interesting, because you’re suggesting, and I think rightly, that there are small losses in social tools, and that’s a big component to a model even more like the slots.

    Thanks again for writing it!
    Michael

  • http://www.gwtindia.com Satinder

    Though I dont agree with that but seems like a different approach. For a majority of people, downtime is a Big turn off. Perhaps that’s the reason FB is hugely successful coz it never faces a downtime.

  • http://www.mujtabahussain.net Mujtaba Hussain

    I am not sure Twitter succeeds because it mimics life. I think it provides a lazy outlet for us to not feel alone. Thats it.

  • http://twitter.com/jixel #dunnoboutthat

    i recall friendster being the “it” social paradigm (yeah back when we used black and white CRTs it seems) but its laggard site serving just made it unusable and excruciating to use. twitter is successful because it’s a simple tool that resonates with people who enjoy its simplicity, in a time when even the web has become so cumbersome. #becomebersome?

  • http://math.hiremebecauseimsmart.com Human Mathematics

    It’s kind of sick that people expect each other to re-tweet their crap. We only need to hide amid the cacophony because so many egos are asking to be stroked.

    I think twitter is a wonderful tool for business but … what’s the point socially? The main use of it seems to be for SEO (or attempts at SEO) … or attempts at publicizing an event that, clearly, nobody actually wants to go to.

    What really bugs me is the “cash value” of friendship the above elicits. A popular person (or, rather “Facebook popular”) all of a sudden has a premium resource: “friends” who have to listen to their self-promotion. That’s one kind of cash value; the other is asking oneself, Exactly how close am I to this person? Do I need to re-tweet or RSVP to their facebook event?

    It’s an ugly situation.

  • Chris

    One might also conduct an experiment examining the relationship between dog ownership and eating of homework. Another shoddy excuse :-)

    (Loved your spot on Science Friday by the way)

  • http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/terry/ Terry Jones

    Interesting :-) I’ve had some similar thoughts.

    http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/terry/2008/06/09/random-thoughts-on-twitter/

    Excerpt:

    There’s a positive side to Twitter’s unreliability. People are amazed that the site goes down so often. Twitter gets snarled up in ways that give rise to a wide variety of symptoms. The result seems to be more attention, to make the service somehow more charming. It’s like a bad movie that you remember long afterwards because it wasn’t good. We don’t take Twitter for granted and move on the next service to pop up – we’re all busy standing around making snide remarks, playing armchair engineer, knowing that we too might face some of these issues, and talking, talking, talking. Twitter is a fascinating sight. Great harm is done by its unreliability, but the fact that their success so completely flies in the face of conventional wisdom is fascinating – and the fact that we find it so interesting and compelling a spectacle is fantastic for Twitter. They can fix the scaling issues, I hope. They should prove temporary. But the human side of Twitter, its character as a site, the site we stuck with and rooted for when times were so tough, the amazing little site that dropped to the canvas umpteen times but always got back to its feet, etc…. All that is permanent. If Twitter make it, they’re going to be more than just a web service. The public outages are like a rock musician or movie star doing something outrageous or threatening suicide – capturing attention. We’re drawn to the spectacle and the drama. We can’t help ourselves: it is our selves. We love it, we hate it, it brings us together to gnash our teeth when it’s down. But do we leave? Change the channel? No way.

    Twitter is both the temperamental child rock star we love and, often, the medium by which we discuss it – an enviable position!

  • http://technbiz.blogspot.com paramendra

    That’s a super insightful comment to make on what is essentially a social network. This has implications. Made me think.

  • Robin

    Plausible deniability.

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