Inside the Valley

When Lily Allen - English singer - left a note saying she’d quit Twitter, 2 things come to mind. Firstly, its annoying even those who are famous. Did Google ever do that? Secondly, what about the 138,541 followers who also are now thinking twice about following someone else. So despite Lily saying she was an “Neo Luddite” I think there are just so many times you want to or have something to say to someone else. The guys up the road in San Francisco at Twitter HQ should be watching carefully as it’s becoming ridiculous how people feel an elephant herd mentality to “tweet” everything. Its like having online tourettes syndrome. Maybe that’s why Lily swears so much in her lyrics!

For the record Twitter was down again today! Probably gave everyone some peace from the tweeting I’m subconsciously hearing these days. One of the secrets of MySpace success was the reputed members which switched from FriendFinder when their service crumbled under a technologically weak infrastructure.

I remember sitting in a meeting in LA in 2005 and listening to people who worked at FriendFinder and them lamenting about how their technology platform failed. The story goes here in Silicon Valley that MySpace picked up lots of dissatisfied FriendFinder customers.

When I hear of Jack Dorsey, who coded Twitter, working on other projects, I put two and two together and voila - we have the real issue. The guy who built the app is not there to oversee it.  I’ve seen shooting stars before and when entrepreneurs see this happening here in Silicon Valley, they pounce. Beware of your trajectory Twitter, programmers who understand scalability and inflection points of customer dissatisfaction are watching.

Having just read the article on Twitter in Time Magazine, and having been involved in some Silicon Valley venture capital meetings around Twitter apps, the most important element to consider is the “noise to value ratio” which measures the number of tweets to the number of relevant tweets a user experiences. Whilst no-one can dispute the “real time” benefits that Twitter offer, I’ve just experienced two Twitter-esque start ups not recieving funding because Venture Capitalists were concerned about the limited value versus volume of tweets. Relevance is key for advertisers and knowing Google so well, I realize that blog posts may become shorter due to Twitter’s 140 character competitor threat but there is something inherently more valuable in expressing an idea beyond a tweet which readers value more.

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