How volatile is the Twitter network?

Late last night Leo Laporte shut down his Twitter account and moved to Jaiku. His reasoning was that there was confusion between TWiT and Twitter. Lame reason aside, what does this do to Twitter?

Twitter has a handful of heavy players: Scoble, Laporte, Winer, Etc. When Laporte decided to leave I started wondering how many would follow. When I created a profile on Jaiku and found that the site had too many SQL connections, I think the answer ended up being "many". What happens if the other heavy hitters decide that Jaiku has a killer feature that they can't live without? What if there's a new site that crops up giving the ultimate in presence awareness?

It's not the technology behind the site, it's the community enabled by that technology that draws people. Lets say for a moment that all of the heavy hitters on Twitter decide to leave and join Jaiku. How many of their loyal followers would leave and join Jaiku with them? Probably a lot. These followers will invite their friends who will invite their friends, and before you know it 90% of the Twitter network has moved to Jaiku. Now a new site called Presencr crops us and has that killer feature that no one can live without. The same cycle continues and now what happens to Jaiku?

There's no reason why I can't be a member of both sites and update both of them, but if most of my friends are on both networks, I'm probably going to start using just one network and I think many will do the same.

Now lets flip the coin. Jaiku only has one heavy hitter and he has only been there for less than a day. How can they grab the other heavy hitters from Twitter and migrate them to their network? Since Twitter has started to become so large, is it even possible to migrate users or will they just stay where they are at now because all their friends are there? If this is the case, what hope does a new presence awareness tool have of taking over Twitter?

Has the battle already been won by Twitter or is the market so young that it's incredibly volatile and could move to any network at any time? It's interesting to watch this play out in the new community driven presence marketplace. What do you think will happen?

Oh, and as a side note, if you want to follow me you may do so using the following links:
Twitter
Jaiku

Too late. Jaiku lets me add feeds from my flickr, del,icio.us, last.fm, blog, and yes, even twitter. Something I always wanted with twitter. Sure, it could be done with bots and the api, but not easily.

So, my plan (for now) is to consolidate everything to Jaiku but do my updating from twitter unless it's Jaiku related. Everyone wins!

People with blogs could aggregate their life their rather than on Twitter or Jaiku. While I only signed up with Jaiku today, so far it seems like a way to create an online presence for those who don't have blogs. What am I missing?

Twitter is simple. The registration, the settings, updating, adding friends and adding it to your blog is very simple. That's why I like it. It's a micro-blog, enough said.

I believe those who will stay are especially those with blogs, because Twitter is a simple tool that you can add to your blog, not a tool you can add your blog to.

Comments

1. Posted by: Justin on April 7, 2007 1:11 PM:

I don't think anything has been won yet. The game is still so early. The twitter user group appears to still be extremeley early adopter and early adopters are a finicky bunch. When I can mention the name to a non-techy and see the recognition in their face like when I mention MySpace, then someone has won.

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