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Sorry Mr. Needleman, I don’t think closing Twitter is the answer.

Rafe Needleman on the Webware blog, wrote an interesting article today on why Twitter should just shut down entirely until the stability problems are fixed. Personally I think the whole concept is ridiculous. But I’ll give you my reasons after you read the article:

As I write this, Amazon.com, like Twitter, is offline. Amazon’s outage is the big news Friday morning. But what of Twitter?

I used to love Twitter. But the site’s pogo status–it’s up! it’s down! it’s up again!–is driving me away. I’ve removed the Twitter sidebar from the Webware home page, and I’ve stopped religiously updating it. Because I figure its users, and my followers, are learning to not trust it, to not bother visiting the site since it’s likely to be down when they visit. Chances are fewer people are reading my Twitter posts now than a month ago.

I believe Twitter is bleeding users. Every time Twitter users go to Twitter.com or to their Twitter app and they see the “Fail Whale,” an error message, or just a non-responsive site, they’re that much less likely to come back the next time. Instead, they’re going to FriendFeed, Jaiku, Pownce, or even the whacked-out Plurk.

Until the Twitter team can get the service working again for good, here’s what they should strongly consider: Close the site. Take it offline. Put plywood over the doors and windows, as it were, with a big “We’re remodeling!” sign on the front. Ask users if they want to be e-mailed when the site reopens for business and don’t send that e-mail until the thing is fixed. Really fixed. Then have a grand reopening party.

It’s not like doing this would cost Twitter revenue. It doesn’t have any. But if Twitter is going to be online, it needs to be reliable. Twitter is not just a toy. It’s a communications platform that people were just beginning to rely on before it overloaded and got flakey. Now, no one can rely on it and we’re learning that at any given moment, there’s a very good chance that Twitter will be offline. The more people who learn that, the fewer people will visit, and the more people will walk across the street to competing services. Remember how Friendster lost its momentum?

If Twitter can’t deliver a reliable experience, I think its best bet is to close until it can. That way, we can all come back to the site at the same time, all together, instead of each of us showing up one by one and finding it deserted.

So, personally I think this is the worst thing that Twitter could POSSIBLY do. Like many popular communities online that go viral and grow exponentially, it’s going through growing pains. This one is going through it worse than many other sites have, but I think we all remember how Myspace and Facebook both were when they started. Buggy, unstable, down half the time. I think its just symptomatic of popularity.

Closing down Twitter would just splinter it’s community. Some users would go to Jaiku, some users would go to Pownce, and some to Plurk or Friendfeed. Sure the major Twitter A-listers could reform a semblance of the old community by all going to one place, but the chances of that happening are miniscule at best. Of course at that point the users would all form new friendships and communities at sites that would be gaining new features all the time in an arms race to grab the former Twitter marketshare.

If and when Twitter returned, I highly doubt that people would give up their new communities, and features, and utilites to return to Twitter, which at this point would look antiquated. Some users would, but it would essentially be a shell of it’s former self, destined to wither and die on the vine. It would be the end of a once vibrant community of people on the verge of mainstream success.

The best thing that Twitter could do, is exactly what it’s doing now.

Be transparent about their scalability problems, outline what they can do to fix it. Develop a roadmap of improvements, eventually culminating in the finished full rewrite of the platform, with the server capacity to sustain it.

Until then, people should realize that Twitter is and can not be mission-critical. It’s a great social space no doubt, but just enjoy using it when it’s there. It will get better, and soon.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments!