SmoothSpan Blog
What is With Twitter? Google, this is Where You Should Step Up
The ink is hardly dry on yesterday’s post about Twitter’s inability to roll out their new UI faster when I wake up to the news that Twitter has been totally hacked. Not just hacked a little bit. Not just hacked if you do some certain thing. Hacked as in, “Don’t even bring up the site or you may get hacked too.” Don’t believe me, it’s all over the web.
By now, Twitter says they’ve fixed the problem, but it’s not exactly confidence inspring. I hear from comments and emails on my other post that the new UI is full of problems too.
Here is a company that has raised over $100M in capital, yet they seemingly have a hard time with the basics. For a long time they couldn’t scale, and now this problem. Do you guys have QA? Do you have a real software development process? Is your architecture solid? Tell me you are not doomed.
Meanwhile, Google has designs on Social Media. Here is the thing Google. These Twitter guys have stumbled and stumbled. Their service is popular, but its technology is straightforward. We can argue about whether it even is Social Media (it isn’t), but that’s not really important. Put your Facebook plans on hold for a time. Build a Twitter clone. Buzz is sort of that, and maybe could serve, but it needs to be dead on and not vague about its intent to supplant Twitter (no pussyfooting around). Weave it into G-Mail and your other apps. Make it better (but don’t do anything weird, focus on polish). Make it stable. Make it a reasonable alternative to Twitter which many have said needs to be an Open Platform anyway. And BTW, make it open and be Switzerland. Put it on Android. Create and nurture a vibrant ecosystem.
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