Om Malik says that Twitter should charge super users like me and come up with a business model.

Dare Obasanjo, in a separate, but similar post comes to the conclusion that Twitter’s problems are due to super users like me.

Interesting that both of these guys are wrong.

First of all, Twitter doesn’t store my Tweets 25,000 times. It stores them once and then it remixes them. This is like saying that Exchange stores each email once for each user. That’s totally not true and shows a lack of understanding how these things work internally.

Second of all, why can FriendFeed keep up with the ever increasing load? I have 10,945 friends on FriendFeed (all added in the past three months, which is MUCH faster growth than Twitter had) and it’s staying up just fine.

But to the point, why not charge super users? I’d pay. But, if Dare and Om are right, there’s no way that I’d support the service enough to pay for my real cost on the service.

Either way, Twitter’s woes were happening long before my account got super huge. Remember SXSW last year? I only had 500 followers and Leo Laporte had something like 800. The service still went down. If this were a straight “n-scale” problem the crashing problems wouldn’t have shown up so early.

Why not just limit account size, like Facebook did? Well, that’s one way to deal with the problem, but if you look at my usage of Facebook it’s gone down to only a few minutes every month. I don’t even answer messages there anymore. Why? Cause I get frustrated at getting messages from people who wonder why I won’t accept them as a friend. It’s no business “utility” if I can’t make infinitely large friend lists and use those lists in the same way I use email (which Facebook also bans).

So, what do I do? I get excited by FriendFeed which lets 11,000 people interact with me in a public way. I have a feeling that that rapid growth will continue unabated and so far Friendfeed has stayed “Google fast.”

Nice try, though.