UPDATE: As you can see, several people have pointed out spelling and grammar mistakes and I have corrected some of them.

Remember back when a lot fewer people were using Twitter and it was being talked about all over the Internet. Of course, Twitter has always been instable unstable, but it’s just gotten worse.

Now, in my small group of close friends, I am pretty sure that I was the first to be using Twitter. Either that or it took a long time for my friends to realize that I had a Twitter account. Now, if I had gone parading around saying that Twitter was the most awesome web service ever, I’d look a little silly now.

A lot of other people have gone parading around and shouting how great Twitter is, while secretly hoping that the small downtime issues would get resolved as Twitter grew. Of course, the downtime issues didn’t go away. If they [the downtime issues] did, the downtime wasn’t gone for long.

A lot of that parading and shouting behavior comes from the desire to be the FIRST to give the news. Humans seem to have some obsession with being first. If you take a stroll through online communities that are not moderated very strictly, you might see a post that only says, “First!” But now some of those people that wanted to be the first about Twitter to crown Twitter as the next best web application probably wish that they had doubted Twitter.

This raises an interesting question. Should we learn from Twitter and wait to see how the service scales up? Well, if there weren’t so many people going around shouting about Twitter, Twitter wouldn’t have grown as quickly, forcing everybody to wait even longer to see how the service is going to scale up. So, then what? If always wanting to be the first to talk about the best is not a very smart thing to do, and waiting takes forever, what is the best course of action?

Well, that answer isn’t easy. Growing and dying is part of a web service’s lifecycle. Plenty of excellent services that probably could scale up very well have died.

But that still doesn’t answer the question. What is the best course of action when you see a promising web service? Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there is one. It’s nearly impossible to accurately predict the future time and time again.

The best advice is just not to put all your eggs in one basket and know that even the biggest are not immune.