New site listing lots of Twitter tools.

Everthing Twitter is a new site that lists lots of interesting tools for twitter. It's a really nice collection with additional descriptions.

You can also find a nice small collection at TwitterHolics

Why will all Twitter-Clones fail?

As twitter started to gain traction lots of services popped up that were cloning it. The latest and one of the most successful was plurk but all of them don't really have a chance until they have the start traffic that would beat twitter in user-base amounts right upstart.

Why?

Twitter doesn't have a viral loop strong enough to grow by itself.  It wasn't designed the way to fully exploit this. The dynamics of jaiku and pownce clearly show that too. However twitter grows... but why? The answer is really simple. Media loves twitter getting news out from it. If media loves you, they will write about you even if you are not newsworthy, but they definitely won't write about a smaller service as it won't be important to them. And as I already wrote twitters viral loop isn't strong enough to grow the service all by itself without the help of the media. So all microblogging services that appear that would attract less users then twitter from start are doomed as they won't get any press coverage.

Competition.

Well google actually thought it's a great idea to buy jaiku that's in fact is just a twitter clone and to be "clean" and launch a service they have stolen bought. However it can take years till they finally go out from their closed beta as it always happen with google's acquisitions, but it could also be earlier leaving twitter with less time to prepare for real competition. If google launches it inside it's gmail using the chat status messages twitter would be dead.

Stronger viral loop.

Earlier in this post i wrote that twitter doesn't have a viral loop that is strong enough to grow the service by itself. It's actually half true... If microblogging ever reaches the point where 20% of Internet users actually use it actively or passively a madness will start. When you have one friend using some service you won't join, if 5 of your friends tell you about it - you would.

KillWithMe.com ? Untraceable - the movie. Viral distribution.

   Just watched the movie "Untraceable". Well a bit late for a movie review of course, but I want to post about would it possible to repeat something similar? Let's leave the killing thing aside, my post is about marketing and not about committing crimes :-)

So let's try to repeat the creation of the bot-net and make the site intended to kill people go viral.

The guy that has built the site in the film is a true genius. You can be good in marketing or tech or at killing people, but being perfect at everything is a rear composition. You need a A-class team to repeat what he did.

1. Tech-possibilities.

   The movie is actually well done in tech-terms. It seems that the authors consulted some professionals and know how Internet works in general.
   Hosting a site on a bot-net is possible, however no one in the world now controls a bot-net of this size. The most successful hackers get around 100.000 installations a day, but that are already teams of at least 5 people. Creating installs cost money. Yes, hacking is not only illegal but also requires money. To create a bot-net of this size the guy would have needed around $1,5M in raw tech costs, 6 Month of time and a great team.

   Taking the site down. Well it's a movie :-) The register of the domain would have blocked it instantly. But let's assume it was some .island domain and FBI couldn't reach the register. Cable providers would block the site really fast and there are also the updates of browsers that could have been used for that. The possibilities of how to take a site down are endless, no site can survive if anybody with money or influence wants it down.

2. Content and viral promotion.

   Some people tend to think that it is enough to have great content to make your site go viral. However it's not. A site that kills victims in real time has good viral potential, but there are tons of sites that list similar recorded media. Each viral promotional loop has it's borders. Starting with one person it usually stops somewhere hitting the users that don't tend to share everything with their friends. Imagine that viral growths is a tree - some branches have lots of branches and leaves, but the leaves are the dead-end where the viral promotion stops. So you have to seed a lot of trees to get the scale.

3. Starting viral promotion.

   How could this guy seed some trees from his cellar? On the second video he has hit the 6.000.000 visitors within an hour. As we know he had a huge bot-net and he had access to user's social network accounts. He could use them to post the link to the site. However passing on usually requires entering the captcha images and it also costs money. Theoretically having HUGE technical possibilities and money it is possible to make it happen, but I haven't heard of anybody capable of reaching that amounts of users in such a short time.

Could you repeat it?

I know there are some really smart people reading this post. Is any of you capable to reach 6.000.000 visitors in 2 hours of time? Due to my calculations making this happen would require something like $2M investments and around 8 month of preparation and I am still not sure if I could repeat it. Well... may be I am just not smart enough.

The Gillmor Gang - FriendFeed interview.

You can listen to the interview here.
Still can't understand the point why is there so much noise about FriendFeed, taking in considiration their lack of traffic. They did get good funding, but right now I don't see FriendFeed as a tool that can be interesting mainstream users. Right now it's pushing the ammount of noise up without the possibility to filter it anyhow.
The guys from gilmor gang were actually pushing FriendFeed to implement the same features Twitter has right now, while FriendFeed was telling "we are not about conversations". I don't really see a future for a site like FriendFeed without being a communication tool. It can get some fans, but unless you get the scale which is not possible without being a comunication tool it just won't get enough people using it on a daily basis.
The tech problems at twitter force hardcore users search for other options, but I think 95% of twitter fans don't really care about that and will patientlly wait till the problems are over which i beleive will happen very soon.