Twitter Boycott Not The First
Today, apart from being Independence Day, is the day that Twittercott is set to make Twitter founders Biz and Evan sit up and listen to the 1,700,000 or so community members who are disgruntled about the frequent Twitter outages.
However this is not the first time that Twitter has been ‘boycotted’.
Keen bloggers Andrew Dobrow and Bwana McCall promoted Twit-Out after reading the following post on FriendFeed [click to enlarge]:
Andrew and Bwana blogged about Twit-Out on May 14, 2008 to promote the actual boycott which took place on May 21, 2008.
Did it work?
In a word — NO. A quick peek at Google Trends shows that there was not a significant dip in the number of unique visitors on May 21 so Twitter did not loose visitors due to a boycott. There was a slight rise in traffic to FriendFeed.com though. Whether this was related to the Twit-Out idea is open to interpretation.
Bwana did write The Twit-Out Aftermath in which he claimed success as it encouraged discussion about Twitter and its problems. A fair point — but weren’t people already having that discussion? If they weren’t no-one would have considered a boycott.
Will it ever work?
Short answer — YEAH but NO!
A boycott on the scale that today’s (or May 21, 2008) will never work. However, if a million Twitter members were to boycott it for a week then perhaps the owners would take immediate action. Although such a huge boycott would probably kill Twitter for good.
Twitter will improve
Twitter’s Fail Whale will be seen less and less over the next few months as investment helps to solve the problems. The best way to help Twitter improve is to keep using it and promote its use.
Be patient my fellow twits.
Related articles on the web
‘Twitter Has Culture‘ by Corvida.
‘Twitter Boycott? Meh‘ by Robert Merrill.
‘Why I am not leaving Twitter‘ a Qik video by Robert Scoble.
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July 4th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
You’re completely right. USING twitter is what will make it better… not leaving it.
July 7th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
As the fellow that called for the boycott (Twittercott) I have to agree that, aside from the fact it fell on deaf ears, it would take a massive drop in traffic for Twitter to pay attention.
Had I done some better research and realized that a boycott had already been attempted, I might have thought better of it. Yet, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Live and learn.