For me, in the past few days, Twitter jumped the shark. It's given me pause to think about why, and about what might be next.

First, I wasn't a latecomer to Twitter. I started there in July or August of 2006, back when it was called Twttr, following that distasteful web two-dot-oh-ish trend of abandoning the letter "e".

Back then there weren't a lot of users. There wasn't anything but a web interface that was pretty rudimentary and SMS. There was no IM interface. There were no special cutesy little apps. What we had at that point was SMS and potential.

Then came SXSW and all the cool kids came to the party. Twitter became the in thing and everyone wanted to be there. That was fun because, for Phoneboy and I, we'd already been playing with the cool new toy for a long time. he and I were very early adopters, exploring ho wit migh tbe useful.

Since then, we'll Twitter's gotten long in the tooth. We've developed a plethora of cutesy-pie Web 2.0ish apps to take away the simplicity. We've watched the server crushed under the weight of users collecting followers and friends purely to assuage their faltering egos. We've seen the most basic interfaces we've come to expect, SMS and IM, run constantly out of synch, or not at all, while the web interface gives us pictures of the Twittercat breaking things further.

In short, for me, Twitter has become nearly useless because it isn't reliable, it isn't predictable and it isn't consistent. If I'm a customer, those are customer service aspects that are important. But Twitter doesn't have a revenue stream, so I'm not a customer. I'm just a user who can click impatiently away to something more interesting, more reliable, more predictable.

Is Twitter Dead?
Nope. Not in my view. But with unreliable SMS and IM interfaces, and a web front end that can't keep up with the crushing load, it seems to be turning into an input mechanism. For me anyway, I send inputs via Twitter. I reply to friends there when I need to. But I don't read Twitter directly any more. At the moment, I tend to read them in Jaiku, but that solution has it's own set of growth challenges. Still, I'm hopeful about Jaiku because it offers something much richer than Twitter.

Jaiku offers the ability to post little snips - Twitter-like nuggets constrained in size. Beyond answering by posting an @usernname post, Jaiku allows comments via the web. That's a nice feature than enables more handily threaded conversations.

Jaiku offers much more because I can incorporate my friends feeds. Any and all if I like. By default I get every feed my friends included in Jaiku. Blogs, Flickr, last.fm, and yes, Twitter. Anything with an RSS feed. Most folks using Jaiku have their Twitter feed showing up in there. I like Jaiku because while my friends may include their music feeds from something like last.fim, I like the ability to pick which of my friends feeds I get. I like that because frankly, while y'all are my friends, I really don't care what you're listening to on your tunes and like being able to unsubscribe from your feeds that don't interest me and stick with the ones that do.

What's Next?
Jaiku has some serious growth ahead. I expect they'll struggle with critical mass just as Twitter has and is. Jaiku is also lacking some of the interface tools. Like Twitter, it's quite workable from the web if you sit at a PC. If you're a mobile user, the Nokia application is limited to the point of only giving a sense of what might be achievable. And yes, there's the web on a mobile, but frankly, mobile web on a cell phone isn't something any of us want to do a lot of. For me, the web interface is via a Nokia N800 tablet, but still, the user experience isn't living up to the potential.

To their credit, the Jaiku team keeps saying good things are coming. To their detriment they've been saying that without delivering for too long. If they don't begin delivering improvements to Jaiku, and continue to leave all the advances come from third-party developers, Jaiku will never get close enough to the shark to make the leap.

And then there's Facebook. And as much as I hate it for a number of reasons, the mobile interaction is coming along nicely. It's simple and it works. I'm finding that I'm starting to use it more and more and more.

The answer? - Mashup. Some will find a way to mash the overlapping functionality of Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook into something new. Something simple yet elegant. Something that works. And it won't matter whether it's a mashup of those three, or yet another something new. We'll flock to it in droves.





Technorati Tags: Twitter, jumping the shark, Jaiku, Facebook