Sometimes, I’ll spot an upcoming Internet fad and think, “Pah! That’ll never catch on!” Like Facebook. Who’d have thought you could make a success of a web site where you replicate your real life relationships online, throw a few people you’ve barely heard of into the social equation and then proceed to poke and zombie bite them until they sever all ties with you in frustration? Not me, that’s for sure.

Other times, people will proclaim something the next big thing and I’ll believe them. Generally, because my judgement is on a par with a drunken Lord Longford’s, this shiny new thing will be good for a while before collapsing under its own awesomeness or sinking into obscurity. Twitter recently suffered this fate outside of North America (and, er, India).

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a service where you sign up, enter your mobile number, get your chums to join you so you have someone to suffer your incessant babbling, and then sit back and watch the updates pour into your mobile phone.

The problem: SMS isn’t free, is it? Twitter have to pay like everyone else, don’t they? Well yes, they do, and that’s why Twitter have recently switched off the text message service outside of North America (and, er, India). The fledgling bridge between your online and real life has become a glorified - and really limited - Facebook wall.

The “fail whale” appears whenever Twitter’s web site breaks. I think it’s appropriate here.

Other Epic Failures

While we’re here, why don’t we have a look at some other online services whose business models will doom them to a life of epic fail, no matter how much venture capital cash can be mashed into them:

1. Gravatar. It’s a glorified image hosting service. Oh sure, it’s an invaluable service for this brave new Web 2.0 world where anybody is literally nobody without their own blog, and what’s a blog without comments and what are comments without avatars and how else can you make your avatar appear everywhere on the web without your mate Gravatar? However, no matter what its intentions, it’s a site you visit once; it then serves up your image file to unconnected web sites forever more. A glorified image hosting service, just one without much opportunity to serve up glorious money-spinning adverts.
2. Any Google competitor. Seriously. Why bother? And finally…
3. Youtube. Try to come up with the worst moneyspinning Internet idea ever, and you still couldn’t do better (worse) than Youtube. To come close, your idea would have to be not only amazingly bandwidth-intensive to serve up video content to ungrateful cretins, but also CPU-intensive to convert all their own videos into streaming Flash format. You’d need to licence every video codec under the sun. You’d need oodles of storage. You’d need your own personal Gestapo to stamp on any dodgy material and keep the copyright lawyers off your back. And to top it all off, you’d have to have your entire user base specially imported from some kind of retard colony.

All right, so the last example is something of an aberration. But the other examples? They are doomed.