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Will Twitter Survive SXSW ?

March 2, 2008 · Print This Article

Here we are on the eve of the ever ever growing in popularity SXSW conference in Austin, TX.  Last year the darling of the dance was our favorite, yet fickle, micro-blogging platform twitter.

Over the last year, Twitter has seen exponential growth and experienced the growing pains that go along with that growth.  We have seen events in the recent past take Twitter to its knees and many fear that may happen again as we get ready for SXSW.  CenterNetworks had a good post on Twitter’s preparations for the event.

Frankly, I think this may be a make or break week for Twitter.  Many of there biggest fans will be at the conference and be wanting full and unfettered use of Twitter to get news out.  This same group is and can be a very fickle group whose loyalties will wane as quickly as they come.  If Twitter hiccups this week, it may be their last.  I think the likes of Pownce, fresh off the release of their new API, can pose a serious threat to Twitter this very week if things do not go smoothly.

So here you go Twitter, here is your big shot to step up and prove all the naysayers wrong.  Personally, I am preparing for the quick switch over to Pownce, which has been made all the easier with their new API.  Good luck twitter, I think you will need it.

Written by jimmy · Filed Under Pownce, Social Networking, Technology, Twitter 
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Comments

4 Responses to “Will Twitter Survive SXSW ?”

  1. Rick Mahn on March 2nd, 2008 3:23 pm

    I think this viewpoint is held by a lot of people. Still it will be hard for many to give up Twitter, even with a significant outage during SXSW. However, with the latest release of Twhirl (v0.7) which runs on the finalized Adobe AIR platform, now includes support for posting to Jaiku and Pownce as well as Twitter. With that functionality, it’s not hard to sidestep Twitter and move to a new service.

    Guess we’ll find out next week - I’ll be watching very closely as I also found Twitter just before SXSW 2007.

    Cheers,
    Rick

  2. Laura on March 2nd, 2008 3:37 pm

    Pownce doesn’t have SMS/phone capabilities. That makes it useless at SXSW. Geeky as the attendees are, they don’t take their laptops to parties and not everyone has an iPhone or Blackberry to be able to use a mobile interface. Twitter worked so well at SXSW because it could be used to find out who was at which party (or in which conference session), and which sessions/parties were good or lame, all via the phone - anyone and everyone could use it. Pownce can’t do that and as such, is not a threat to Twitter.

  3. jimmy on March 2nd, 2008 3:47 pm

    @Laura, You do have a point, the one, at least one, limitation of Pownce is the lack of SMS support, I forgot about that. but as Rick states, with the new API, there are already many like ModdBlast, twhirl and others already adding Pownce support for posting.

    I just think this may be a very telling week for Twitter.

    Thanks for stopping by !

    jimmy

  4. Corvida on March 5th, 2008 12:24 pm

    Regardless of what happens, I highly doubt a move to Pownce by a significant number of Twitter users will happen. We’ve survived their infamous outages this long…

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