Dude, just pay for it already
I just read a post called “Twitter timelines stopped updating hours ago. Why no word from the mothership?” by Martin Bryant at theNextWeb.com … here’s the meat of it:
This is a familiar problem – Twitter has these glitches from time-to-time – but after six hours you’d have thought Twitter might have noticed and updated their Status Blog with a reassuring update that they were aware of the problem and were working on a solution. Alas no, they’re silent.
As Twitter becomes a utility for increasing numbers of people, it really can’t afford to be complacent with service faults. The fault may have emerged in the middle of a weekend night at Twitter HQ in California but do they not have 24-hour service engineers? If not, why not?
So you have a service — a valuable service, given that it has become a “utility” for many — and it’s free, and you’re clearly ticked off that it’s been unavailable for part of the day. Actually, this was posted on Feb 28th, so that was Sunday. This guy is indignant about a free service going down over the weekend.
Wow. Words escape me.
Hey, Twitter, I find your service valuable enough to pay for it, and I think I speak for most of the twitterverse on that topic. People have pointed this out before: don’t put anything important in the cloud unless you’re paying for the service. With free services, you get what you pay for, and expecting anything more than that is foolish. Getting more than nothing for a free service (Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.) is pure gravy, and we should not lose sight of that.
More importantly, I think these free services, rather than going to advertising and all-out sales for sustainability (like Facebook is now doing), might want to consider other avenues. I maintain that the reason iTunes succeeded was because the price-convenience ratio was right, meaning that, even though people had become accustomed to downloading free music on the net, iTunes put a pay-for-music model out there that was more convenient than pirating and at a low enough cost that people chose it over pirating. If Apple had priced each track at $2.99 would they have done as well? I think not. This just goes back to an argument people were making a decade ago: that as soon as the cost of downloading something becomes less than the cost of storing it, piracy will disappear. If you can rent a movie for about the cost of a blank DVD, which do you think people will choose? (likely answer: the more convenient one)
Right now, these free services are wonderful: they are convenient and powerful. Supporting the business models with advertising, direct marketing, and shopping is one clear avenue, but when you have exposed your APIs, then you have paved an advertising-free path to your content (which, personally, I will always take, given the option). So instead of cluttering up your content with ads, why not take the iTunes approach and set a price point that is (a) high enough to keep the business alive, including 24-hour engineering support :) and (b) low enough that deciding whether to opt in is a no-brainer for your existing client base.
Actually, now that I think about it, Apple’s App Store is already set up for precisely this arrangement, supporting free apps that charge subscription fees for their content (I’m looking at you, iPad). If that’s the case, it will be interesting to see how quickly the net wakes up to the idea that we should be paying, at least a little, for the content we digest.
UPDATE (2 Mar 2010): I just read “Why DRM Doesn’t Work, Or: How to Download an Audio Book From the Cleveland Public Library” by The Brads. Funny cartoon that underscores the sentiment.
