Twitter gets Pwnced! while Jaiku Readies the Torpedoes
This is gonna get ugly. Twitter has one of the slowest dev cycles I've ever seen. All these people asking for feature upgrades— they never happen. Correction: they happen all right, but they happening at Jaiku, Facebook, and now Pownce.
Context & Ripple Effects
As of mid-2007 the short-messaging field is crowding fast: Pownce has just launched taking aim at Twitter directly, and Jaiku — already positioned as Twitter's closest feature-for-feature competitor — is confirmed to be preparing its own competitive push. This piece lands squarely in the middle of that three-way contest.
The argument here, echoed in the surrounding commentary of the moment, is that Twitter's development pace is unusually slow relative to demand: feature requests pile up on Twitter while comparable upgrades ship first at Jaiku, Facebook, and now Pownce. With no syndicated pickup and little prior corpus coverage, the story rests almost entirely on this framing of the dev-cycle gap as the battlefield.
First-order effects
- Twitter users asking for feature upgrades now have two visible alternatives shipping them — Pownce at launch and Jaiku in its confirmed pre-push state — so every unshipped request becomes a churn risk rather than a backlog item.
- Pownce enters the market with its fastest-moving features as its differentiator, forcing Twitter's roadmap to be judged publicly against a rival's launch cadence rather than its own history.
Second-order effects
- Jaiku's prepared competitive push means Twitter faces pressure on two fronts simultaneously — a new entrant attacking on feature velocity and an incumbent rival timing its move to the lag — raising the cost of staying quiet on its roadmap.
- Facebook's presence in the comparison pulls the contest beyond standalone microblogging: feature expectations are being set by a broader platform, which pressures both Twitter and Jaiku to justify why their narrower services deserve the update lag or loyalty respectively.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, microblogging competition in 2007 consolidates around development velocity as the primary axis of differentiation — favoring teams that iterate quickly and punishing category leaders whose scale slows their release cycles.
- A sustained feature gap between Twitter and its rivals would make the category's winner less a matter of who defined status updates and more a matter of who ships improvements first, inviting acquisition or consolidation pressure on slower movers.
The trend: Short-messaging services in 2007 are competing increasingly on feature-shipment speed, with Twitter's slow development cycle becoming the explicit attack surface for Pownce and Jaiku.