Twine in Freefall?

What happened to Twine? Earlier this year, VentureBeat characterized Twine as an "early success", based on information from Compete.com. ReadWriteWeb followed suit in March explaining that Twine could soon surpass Delicious.com. In May, Techcrunch made the observation that Twine had overtaken Friendfeed in traffic. Fast Company wasn't as fast, but in June it echoed the comments with an article labelling Twine as "red-hot".

Twine indeed surpassed Delicious in May and June. That was shortlived, however. Since then, the same source VentureBeat used to discuss Twine's traffic, Compete.com, which Twine has endorsed a number of times, shows a huge drop in traffic. According to the traffic tracking application, Twine's traffic would have been divided by 10 between an April peak of 2M unique visitors and the August number of just about 208,000. Quantcast, on its end, reports peaks in April and July above 500K "people", together with a similar drop in August with 50,000 visits only. I don't know which source is correct about the volumes, or how their definitions of unique visitors and people differ, but the trend is what matters and it is striking. Alexa, generally much less reliable, doesn't show a huge drop, although it doesn't show any increase either.

According to all 3 sources, Twine is now back well below Delicious and Friendfeed. Have you read anything about that? I haven't.

So my questions: has Twine lost all his market momentum? Is Compete.com mistaken (isn't it what start-ups often claim after endorsing those sources, once south trends start showing)? Why has no press coverage been reported by Twine since May? Is it an anomaly, or the calm before the storm, and Twine is about to unveil a number of killer features and claim its groove back? (in my observation, once you lose momentum, it is very hard to get it back.) And why are none of the usual tech sources talking about it? Is it because it's riskier to report critically than to praise companies that succeed? Or has the summer just taken its toll?

Pictures speak 1,000 words:

 

 

 

This is a good illustration of the post I wrote last Friday on my other blog Growth Times (previously To Revenue, I just completed a name change), Welcoming Constructive Criticism, a Key Success Driver for Start-Ups.

For the record, back in February I published an interview with Nova Spivack, the founder of Twine, in which we took a 360-degree view of the application, with a focus on some concerns raised on a VentureBeat discussion in the past. I published the interview as is but added personal comments on usability stats provided by Twine, in my view showing what I have long suspected to be low engagement. Nova took offense at this public criticism and instead of looking at the feedback itself and address it calmly and constructively, he decided to libel me on twitter, through tweets he has since deleted. Ok, I know, I sound like a conspiracy theorist - but anyone who knows me know that, while I do like a good debate, I put great pride in being as fair and honest as possible, and I value truth and transparency before all. A number of users (and excommunicated users) have already experienced the Manichean, friend-or-foe approach of Twine's CEO, that's conditional upon paying lip service to the application. I have already denounced this type of PR approach in a post on this blog. Anyway, the point is that Nova mentioned he wouldn't take any interview with me anymore (he probably missed that I'm not a journalist), and so I have not contacted Twine for this post. I'm sure they'll respond one way or another, and hopefully we'll get some clarity as to whether this traffic issue is real. 

Let's be clear, I have also long complimented Twine and described it in my talks and posts as the flagship application of the semantic web - and I still do. This flagship status is why I am so interested in it. I believe we are only at the dawn of the metadata age, that our capability to create and manage metadata is still primitive and, as a corollary, that autotagging of the kind Twine achieves is much needed. I long for some of the functionalities announced by Twine for the end of this year, i.e. the ability to manipulate tags through ontologies and create complex queries as a user.

My theory was, and still is, that twine has a usability deficit. So many users going to Twine report 'not knowing what to do' or 'what it's for'. It lacks a sense of direction. Another example is the Daily Digest that a user receives from the application. I relied on this digest when I had but a few subscriptions to twines. Now that I have well over a dozen, the digest gives me an indigestion. Twine offers the option to select which Twines you want to see in your digest, and that's a step in the right direction, but not a solution to information overload: it's obvious what's needed is item-level selection and prioritization, not removing a full twine all together. As far as I can see, many other users have complained about this, but I was told that's a small issue and that's not the focus of the efforts. Addressing this, Twine would have the potential to become the filter of choice for information on the web, but I guess that doesn't strike them as something important to do. 

That wouldn't be a problem if at least Twine wasn't reacting defensively about those suggestions. But instead, interacting with them feels like grinding metal forks with your bare teeth. As such a rich tagging application, it's disappointing that Twine doesn't go beyond "good" or "bad" when labelling public feedback. Now it might be paying the price of its complacency towards constructive critics. And if the graphs above are confirmed, they might want to pick up a copy of Crossing the Chasm on their way home, too.

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