Twitter Pessimism and Exponential Growth

Posted on March 26, 2007

Twitter may be the talk of Silicon Valley but it isn't without detractors in the mainstream media. One very pessimistic article found here in the Spokesman Review asks, "Why is blogworld atwitter over Twitter?." They say Twitter may be one of this era's silliest fads.

But the service of San Francisco-based Obvious Corp. might go down as one of the era's silliest fads, along with unreadable MySpace designs and blog widgets that display pictures of recent visitors.

It also pokes fun at Twitter users.

These deep thoughts leap into the world as blog posts - as well as text and instant messages to blather-stream subscribers. But it probably won't take many posts about midnight fridge raids and toenails ripping through socks for readers to conclude their Twitter pals are turning into twits.

However, they do compare the talking about nothing aspect of Twitter to Seinfeld. They may have meant this to be a negative but Seinfeld was a very successful and long running tv show.

Remember the "Seinfeld" episode in which Jerry and George pitch NBC "a show about nothing"? At one point Costanza asks a network executive, "What did you do today?"
"I got up and came to work," the exec replies.
"There's a show!" George exclaims. "That's a show."
That's also a Twitter.

The latest estimates for Twitter's number of users is 80,000. The pessimists don't want to hear it but Twitter has probably already reached a point where it will continue growing exponentially even if some of the early adopters drop out. Exponential growth is likely for Twitter providing they can continue adding enough servers and bandwidth to keep the service operating smoothly and providing they can add new features that make more users and publishers interested in Twitter.