What a fickle group we new media consumers are. Twitter had been everyone’s new crack for the last year or so, then, twitter stumbles (and no, this has nothing to do with my last column about Twitter’s TOS) and all of a sudden a cry emanates from the throng for an alternative to twitter. Maybe it’s Jaiku (with its newly minted Google money), or perhaps Pownce, maybe its BrightKite, or FriendFeed, Tumblr, or any other number of alternatives.

Fickle Users

How is it that Twitter (everyone’s favorite social media darling just six months ago) has fallen from grace so quickly? Okay, so they’ve experienced some downtime as of late, and they’ve admitted at least once that they had no idea what was going on and now they’re blaming it on “popular users” (which definitely pissed off one Robert Scoble). To be truthful, downtime is nothing new for Twitter, in fact, they’re downtime has been on the upswing since last January. What seems to be new is the constant griping about downtime (maybe it’s just me, but I don’t recall this kind of vocal complaint from the tweeterboard before the most recent incident.)

So, what has changed in social media that is causing this wave of outrage? Is it the introduction of tools similar to Twitter? Well, since many of these tools (FriendFeed, Pownce, Jaiku, Tumblr, etc…) have been around for a good while, I can’t imagine that this alone is the sole reason. Is it the seeming refusal of Twitter to admit that its service has some serious scalability issues (or at the very least is less than perfect?) This is a possibility, although I think that we all understand the concept of growing pains, we’ve all used Windows at some point in our lives. Or, is it a growing undercurrent of vocal support for other applications?

On May 21st, the first ever International Twit-out was attempted (the term “twit-out” was created by Susan Beebe who advocates for the use of Friendfeed). Fortunately for Twitter, it didn’t seem to gain much traction (although it would be hard to know just how many people actually participated). The Twit-out was a call to Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone to improve communication between the service and their user community. Unfortunately, the call (which was apparently placed using a very old cell-phone in a dead spot) never got through.

The increasing displeasure with Twitter has probably led to increased traffic through FriendFeed and possibly even driven some people over to Pownce (which was supposed to be Twitter on steroids when it released last year), but I haven’t seen any significant change in tweet volume, nor have I noticed any prominent twitterers who have moved off of the service (although it’s possible, although doubtful, that Scoble will take his 25K+ fans and go somewhere else.) Regardless, the backlash against Twitter has begun, and it has been pretty prevalent.

I guess my question is this: Are social media junkies so fickle that we cannot forgive growing pains? Granted, Twitter could certainly have handled this situation better than they are at present, but have they really done anything to warrant abandonment? Should we as users move on to the next thing every time a site or service starts having issues?

Personally, I say no (but I only speak for myself). I won’t be abandoning twitter in favor of another tool just because they’ve hit a rough patch in the road. I would hope that all of the people who have been touting Twitter for many months now would do the same. But, that is just my opinion. What do you think? Should we as a user community starting looking for true alternatives to Twitter or should we tough it out until they get their ducks in a row? Additionally, why is Twitter receiving so much harsh criticism when so many other services have come and gone or died on the vine (Socialthing! anyone)? Why is the backlash so vehement towards Twitter?

Greg Hollingsworth is a marketer and blogger who also writes about politics on Devil’s In The Details.

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