http://tech-sass.com

I now use twitter and admit that I was wrong. Twitter is a killer app that will be part of everyone's life. Its really just a slight twist on the IM that has been around for a decade. But at the same time its a home-brew citizens-band news-wire connecting us all in real time!

I do wonder though how much milk is left in the social media cow. OK, I'm all for viral, and social media is a mutant of viral, and confers a bonus multiplier to any investment. But how many twitters fit on my screen. Didn't that MBA teach us that an industry has 2 or 3 leaders and then some also rans?

Twitter nearly buckled under the message load when Softbank sank $430mm into their anointed PRC facebook xerox. There were hundreds if not thousands of facebook clones (down to the page layouts and color, just translating the text into Mandarin) in the land of "to become rich is glorious". But in one shot, Softbank took the air out of the space and proclaimed one the winner. Didn't that MBA teach us that an industry has 2 or 3 leaders and then some also rans?

Among twitter's admirable qualities: its simplicity. I can think of another successful company with a simple user interface: Google. Also like the way they use simple URLs and expose their name space. Touches like these really enhance viral vector infection rates. Everything should be made as simple as possible...

... but no simpler. See recent buzz that twitter's choice of Ruby on Rails is not scaling. We've all seen the outages. http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/twitter-said-to-be-abandoning-ruby-...
Many comments on a smorgasbord of competing web app technologies, with a fair helping of fanboy noise mixed in with the signal.