What makes facebook good at what they do? Two things - 1) they're great at creating a stable, secure and relatively spam-free platform to hold and share your personal information and 2) they provide a really nice experience from which you can input content and consume content from your friends. Sure you can lodge complaints about their deficiencies in both these areas but really, when you stop to think about it. Nobody in the social networking space does both of them consistently better.
I think those are the two things that are hardest to do in the space. User experience has not been a fixture of the social web (see mySpace, Youtube, etc), but it has become critically important in the realtime web. #1 has always been a priority but the challenges (and opportunities) have gotten bigger with the advent of realtime.
Twitter isn't good at either of those things - they're good at agility. They sacrifice a lot in the service of speed - they limit your characters, they collect hardly any info about you, they're spammy as hell, and essentially, they produce a firehose that shoots out data blindly. But it's reliably quick. And nimble and flexible.
As for number 2, they don't even try. They never intended to be that company. They're the platform. The network. And they let you build whatever you want to interface with that platform.
It's a strategy that makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. You have companies that build mobile phones, and companies that build the voice and data networks that we communicate on.
But when you get a really good interface, like Brizzly, you start to see the limitations of their firehose approach. The flow of information is... janky, spurty... ramrodded into the interface.
The PuSh solution (I capitalized that all wrong, but you get the point - there are random things capitalized) is the realtime solution being pursued by Google and others. This approach reminds me of RSS or (obviously) push email - you subscribe to data streams and the updates are pushed out to subscribers. See buzz.
My feeling is that an open push system would result in a much smoother end user experience, BUT the firehose it all about possibilities - finding data you didn't expect, combining and playing with every bit of the data and metadata to add value to it. I can't imagine that push allows for this much creativity. Note: this is me projecting, I don't feel like I've gotten to test realtime behavior with push enough yet.
What I want is for a company like tumbr or Brizzly to say - OK, we're going to become the best receiver possible for your social networks. Like friend feed, but built around the experience of realtime behavior (IMO friendfeed was built around the idea that it could connect a bunch of networks). And then for ten more companies to do the exact same thing.
And in order for this to happen, the Twitters and Facebooks and Googles are going to have to commit to providing realtime service to these "telephones" that acts like a network. They have to deliver better and faster and more reliably. They have to commit to competing like telecom networks, and not like websites.
Decoding realtime information and making the best user experience out of it is a real challenge and an opportunity for pure creativity. That's what our sqatter platform is based on - and next week we reveal our first sqatter product - the TwitterPoll, in conjunction with the second season of TV in a Flash (
http://tv.com/tvinaflash).
I see more and more products like this every day. But they will never reach their potential until the whole ecosystem adopts the Twitter model and focuses on getting really good at it. And for all those twitter business model haters - motorola is a great, profitable company, but I'd take AT&T or Verizon's P&L any day.
