Twitter turns a corner, dodges sharks

Two interesting observations re Twitter this weekend:

Firstly, last night during the Eurovision song contest a number of people on my network were chatting to each other about it, and having a grand old time. I wasn't watching it, but it was fun interacting with some of them every so often. But what is more interesting is that this was the premise of what watching Joost and the other Web TV plays was going to be all about - you watched Joost TV and used their own IM system to chat to your friends.

The concept was right, but the execution followed a Real Life path of least resistance - what we call "good enoughs" - to execute.

Terrestrial TV is already here, Twitter is already here and - importantly - probably already has a critical mass of people who know each other. The users mashed them together to produce a service they wanted, and did it manually themselves - via laptop. And I suspect that laptop on the lap watching TV is going to be a strong "good enough" for quite awhile - especially if, as we suspect, web TV will go the MyPCTV direction. This I think is going to be a major usage of multicast IM systems such as Twitter (you need the group to make it fun) going forward.

(Update - I note Darren Waters at the BBC also noticed this)

Secondly, I noticed Twitter treated their latest overcapacity issue very cleverly, by keeping the real time chat function going while cutting back on the second order network link-based messaging such as replies etc. This meant the system didn't keel over. I think this is a smart plan, as the 80/20 value of Twitter I suspect is in the live chat (Live chat has been the killer app in most sites that had it 'till now, can't see why it wouldn't be on Twitter). This to my mind draws most of the venom out of the critics of their currently non 5x9 reliability service (stops the feeding frenzy of the Friendfeed sharks ) . In fact, I'm not sure it needs to become a full 5x9 service in the short term if they can keep chat going. (In fact, I see some wag has suggested they could even monetise the downtime )