Twitter : Friendster :: Pownce : MySpace?

I’ll be brief.

Twitter‘s spotty performance used to be an irritating blemish on an otherwise lovely (if relatively lightweight) service. But after months of irregular but frequent downtime (including two separate incidents of a broken site just today), it has become the site’s defining characteristic. People are patient with a cute startup’s growing pains, but Twitter has, in theory, been working on scaling up for quite a few months now–and things are only getting worse.

It reminds me of Friendster’s notorious slow performance, and at this point I suspect it presages much the same fate–a reversal in public opinion, leading to a competitor eclipsing it right when it’s about to start making money. Of course, I still don’t see “microblogging” as anything but a loss leader component of a bigger social networking system (read: Facebook), but that’s another story, and it doesn’t help Twitter fix its technical problems, anyway.