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Another one: after so many downtimes, charging Scoble as solution? Seriously, not good PR. ;)
3rd and my favorite one: limit the number of posts (as Twitter does with the number of characters). Per hour, per 10 minutes, I don't know. But do it. Dion Hinchcliffe made a quick survey last week and it appears that are too many updates out there, and they are disturbing people. That's the main complain. I believe a lot of people don't remove the too frequent updaters because they still feel they're useful, good, but it is not easy.
Twitter was built on the keep it simple philosophy. It should stay that way. Maybe its limits started as a fun challenge, but they're really the usefulness basis of the service.
but they do need to seperate out the most popular users (10k+ followers/follow).
like a shared web host server needs to migrate and off-load the busiest sites so the "normal" sites dont get effected by intense resource usage.
regardless of how this is technically achieved for twitter... this would be the only emphasis i would place on the top users such as scoble and yourself.
maybe you top peeps can run your own twitter satellite servers ;)
charging money for the top users is a ridiculous idea and you already stated why. their is no solution in that. i'll have to go read malik's post to gain context but it's quire narrow-minded for twitter, inc. to even consider. twitter, as they state themselves, should only focus on the service and later, monetization can be realized.
(had to edit original sloppy writing while drinking).
Exactly! I'm not sure why people keep saying Twitter should start charging for service (in one way or another), it's not going to fix their problems.
Twitter going down so often is the best PR for Twitter. The amount of discussions about it around the net is unprecedented for such a small startup. Right now Twitter can afford this kind of PR as there is no alternative.
Indeed, Twitter doesn't need money, they don't even want it. Only getting the right people behind the code can solve the issues.
It wouldn't be Google - they already have Jaiku, which can do everything that Twitter can do, and more. It wouldn't be Microsoft - they don't see the value. It might be Yahoo, but who wants to be bought by them at the moment?
http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/05/6-mos...
What a crock. I didn't join twitter for any "power user" it's about communities of people (plural). twitter has outgrown *any* celebrity twitterer. It did long ago.
I don't disagree with you that it's outgrown that phase.... At any rate, it has a long, long, long way to go before it can say it's an essential/important service for people. Anecdotally, take a look at this:
http://google.com/trends?q=facebook%2C+twitter&...
If I've understood Twitter's current (original?) architecture correctly, it doesn't work like a mail system, i.e. tweets aren't copied to all of your followers as soon as you tweet them. They sit in a database, waiting for one of your followers to load their Twitter home page or make an API call through an app, thus pulling that tweet out of the database (or out of memcache, or whatever) once for that user. If you have thousands of followers then yes, eventually thousands of people will pull that tweet out of the database but unless they all check for new tweets simultaneously (which, with a limit of 70 API calls per minute, is unlikely), this shouldn't be a problem.
The fact that most Twitter API-using apps have a mailbox-like interface and only read each new tweet from your follow list once, then store it locally, might have contributed to a general misunderstanding of Twitter's architecture. You are still pulling those tweets; the people you follow are not pushing them to you.
So if all the above is a correct (albeit very simplified) overview of Twitter's architecture, then the real "expensive" users are those who follow huge lists of people (as 'jk' states below). I would guess that are far more of these than there are people with huge follow lists, because it's so much easier to follow thousands than it is to be followed by thousands. People abuse the follow action as a way to advertise themselves (and usually the website URL on their profile) for free. All you need to do is click random people on the 'Everyone' feed and follow them.
These people are an annoyance for non "power-users" like myself who have only a small number of followers, most of whom I know personally. I like to know which of my friends have caught the Twitter craze so I regularly check the new additions to my followers list. All too often, a new follower turns out to be the owner of some start-up website, who is following 25,000+ people yet has only a few hundred followers and is no doubt not at all interested in reading my own tweets so much as he is interested in me reading his or checking out his website.
As a solution to this follow-spam, I'd propose charging for huge follow lists, not huge followers lists. Let regular users follow a maximum of, say, 5,000 users. Then make a "Twitter Pro" account where that cap is lifted to a higher number or removed altogether.
Right now, Scobleizer's spew factor is 319,712,016, based on multiplying 25896 (number of followers) by 12346 (number of posts). The only way that would be correct would be if Scobleizer got 25896 followers BEFORE his first posts.
It also implies that all replies go to all followers, which isn't true either.
Neat idea thought.