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Is Twitter going to win regardless of its problems?

Every morning, I load up my Zune with a pretty significant list of podcasts that I listen to throughout the day.  One of my favorites of late has been The Gillmor Gang.   Besides the astute political commentary, they have been delving into an extremely deep discussion of social media, and the state of microblogging sites like Twitter, Friendfeed, Identi.ca, and others.  When I say extremely deep, I mean almost every show for 6 months deep.

On the show, Steve and the gang tend to lambast Twitter for its downtime, its lack of track over IM, and its reluctance to give up the “firehose” feed ( the main feed of all tweets in and out ) to other services besides Friendfeed.  They bring up some good points, but I think they are too far inside the topic to see that despite all they are saying,  Twitter is winning.  Big time.

The one thing that most people tend to overlook with Twitter is it’s simplicity.  140 text characters per post.  That’s it.  No photos, no videos, no threaded discussions.  Simple.  Elegant.

While the power users want more and more features, they forget to think about what all of those features would mean for a site like twitter.

A real-time Twitter, at least for someone who follows hundreds of people, would start to become more like an AOL chat room, and less like a microblog.   People, instead of using the 140 characters like a status message, would use it as a jumping off point to more or less IM people back and forth.  The noise would climb exponentially and make the service near unusable for the majority of the people who use it.

But, none of this really matters in the long run, and it has nothing to do with the reasons Twitter will reign victorious among the Microblogging services, (at least for the near future).

The simple fact is, that Twitter has mindshare.  Just about every blogger on the planet has a Twitter account that they use frequently, and it has started to move towards the mainstream.  I’ve seen TELEVISION news reports on Twitter,   MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow even admitted on the air that she’s a Twitterholic.  Not to mention that celebrities like Britney Spears are starting to make their way onto the service, and will likely bring LEGIONS of followers who will use and love Twitter just as much as the rest of us.  The simple fact is, that the majority of the “regular people” who eventually end up on Twitter, will continue to use it without much concern for other services like Friendfeed, Identi.ca, or Pownce, simply because Twitter will do what it’s designed to do.

The only hope that sites like Friendfeed have, are to hold on until the time that Twitter gets so big and bloated with hundreds of millions of users, that problems with either spam, or hacking, or (more likely) unavailability,  cause users to get frustrated enough to move somewhere else.