re: “if a service fails to live up to some basic expectation of up time or features, I will just leave. That however, doesn’t explain why Twitter survived so many outages.”
Perhaps Twitter survived because they were unique and no-one else provided what they provide. Now that Facebook does more or less perhaps they will have to compete instead of simply augment. I know I am tired of reading tweets, and then logging into Facebook to see all the same tweets as status updates there. In the end, Facebook aggregates both my friends’ tweets and updates from friends not using Twitter, so its easier for me to catch up there. However, I get tweets from people I’m not friends with on Facebook so there is still value in Twitter. What I will end up doing eventually, through Facebook controls, Twitter controls or a yet to be created third party tool, is segment my Facebook updates to be all my friends, and my Twitter updates to be everyone else. This is one reason why people want groups in Twitter. I haven’t used groups in Facebook much before, but with the fire-hose of updates currently going on and the placement of groups in the upper right of the new home page, it seems we are being nudged in that direction.
