Strategy in Principle

I believe Twitter is waning for two simple, subtle reasons: 1) It's not creating persistent value, and 2) it's an unreliable communication channel.

What do I mean by "no persistent value?" Old tweets do not show up in searches anywhere. (See "Older tweets are temporarily unavailable.") The information in these tweets effectively drops off the end of the earth, lost to anyone unless they want to sequentially sift through someone's history. Imagine writing for a blog, knowing that in two weeks your article won't show up in any Google searches? How useful would Google be if it only indexed things posted to the Web in the last week?

This limitation threatens to relegate Twitter to the realm of mindless chatter instead of the world of real, personal resources. Example: My twitter stream is designed to be a persistent resource of micro-ideas, thoughts, and tips that would actually help people. But its value drops if you have to read the entire thing start to finish to find what you want.

A temporary workaround is to use archiving services such as TweetBackup or grabbing the RSS feed for a twitstream and adding it to our preferred RSS reader, but these won't help you or other users retro-actively search Twitter for old tweets.

Without third-party tools, Twitter is a leaky, inconsistent means of communication. Yes, I know that's part of its beauty, since you can turn off the background noise and see only some of it some of the time. I like that. Yet I've also had colleagues tweet me @replies that didn't get seen for a week or more, and they were miffed. They were expecting something that Twitter isn't really designed for, but that's the point! They expected it. Twitter didn't deliver it. Currently, Twitter can only send you email notices of Direct Messages, not your @replies. In contrast, Facebook lets you get notices of any messages people leave for you. That's important if you want to reply promptly and really contribute to a community.

Twitter should add an option, pronto, to send you immediate or daily digests of @messages (any tweet that mentions you). Without it, it's an unreliable communication channel, and it's value diminishes. It becomes "optional" communication, most useful once again for mindless chatter.

The workarounds for this are far from obvious to the average Twitterer. Take a look at notify.me and this article for solutions.

1) Hopefully, Twitter will fix their search and notification limits ASAP, and hopefully they will remain relevant.

2) If not, look for some other micro-blogging platform to emerge. It may include features from a three other new ideas coming our now. 

The first network is Foursquare, a location-based social network that allows you to "announce" and keep track of places you've been. The second social service is Plancast, which allows you to "broadcast" your plans to friends and colleagues. And the last network is Tungle, which allows you to schedule meetings by proposing multiple possible meeting times, publishing your schedule's free and busy times, and inviting others to book meetings.

Check out this great video explaining how these three programs can keep you productive and connected. They may be the services to dethrone Twitter, if these problems persist.