by Lex Davidson

I was speaking with a writer friend of mine for lunch yesterday.  This certain individual said that when he posted a blog discussing Twitter he was receiving 2-3 times the traffic to the article.  This has been one of the hottest topics of early adopters for the past few months and it doesn’t seem to be losing any momentum.  At the recent WWDC, I think I read just as many articles about the status of Twitter being able to handle the volume of Tweets coming down the pipeline as I read about the 3G iPhone.

And to it’s credit, Twitter stayed pretty much alive despite the mass of micro-messages being distributed that day.  However the question I had was, isn’t it pretty sad that an application that many have come to rely on for communication gets praised for simply ’staying up’?

When we launched Editechial yesterday we simultaneously started a new Twitter account: http://twitter.com/editechial simply because the industry demands ubiquity across all mediums.  However there was some debate in the office of whether or not we should support a medium that many believe to be dying.  Internet Evolution spoke with Scott Hepburn, copywriter at PRstore’s DesignCentral, and this is what he believes about the service:

“Whether Twitter will suffer the same fate as Friendster, Hepburn says, depends on how it handles the coming summer months — with one day carrying particular weight. “I think we’ll know by the end of summer what the future of Twitter is. I have a specific date in mind — August 26, when the Democratic convention is… when the general election season kicks into high gear. That’s when we’re going to see literally a storm of Twitter activity,” he says. A Twitterstorm. If Twitter can’t keep up during that period of high demand, it will go away.”

These type of viewpoints are not slowing down the PR buzz about the service though.  Some of the viewpoints are still optimistic, others are negative, and many seem to be searching for the Myspace to Twitter’s Friendster.  I really enjoyed the company profile from Venture Beat’s Anand Rajaraman today, when he discussed India’s SMS GupShup.  See an excerpt below:

“The rapid growth of SMS GupShup certainly testifies to the latent need for the service in India. The company’s employees created the first set of groups and invited their friends, who were young and tech-savvy. Usage took off rapidly from there. The first set of groups centered on humor (including some quintessentially Indian joke varieties that don’t translate well into English), technology, horoscopes, weather, and health. The service is very popular among college students, stockbrokers, clubs, and some large employers with distributed teams. User numbers have skyrocketed from just over 1 million in January to 7 million in June. Today over 10 million messages are sent every day over SMS GupShup. The largest group is the Sikh Network, whose members include 140,000 followers of the Sikh religion. Each day the coordinator of the group posts a quotation from the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs.”

So if there are companies out there like India’s GupShup that are distributing messages on a much larger scale than Twitter, it simply falls to reason that someone will emerge as the leader of this newborn industry.  I think it’s funny when I hear colleagues talking about Twitter as if they were Google and would not be toppled, regardless of service outages.  Twitter has created an extremely addicting service, however if it doesn’t rectify its scalability issues it will soon be removed from the tech elite and will join Arrington’s ‘deadpool’.