At what point do we finally call a spade a spade and just give up on Twitter?
This morning the Twhirl client I use started acting really flaky. Tweets wouldn’t post… or they would post but then would lock up Twhirl. Sure enough, the folks at Seesmic/Twhirl used their new ability to send out status updates to give us this:
I tried sending an update, but I have no way to find out if it got there because Twitter’s main page currently has the wonderful “fail whale”:
There’s been no end of commentary in the blogosphere on Twitter’s instability in recent days… a quick Techmeme search will show some of the flow of articles, in particular Dave Winer’s “State of the Twitter” and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch post about the conversation moving to FriendFeed.
The question remains… how much longer will we all put up with Twitter’s downtime?
It’s almost like a digital version of “crack”… we keep returning to feed our addiction to the conversation. Surely it will get better now, we think. They must have fixed it after this update. With all that investment money, they must be able to fix this, right?
Why don’t we go to FriendFeed? Or Plurk? Or, heck, even Facebook with it’s status messages? Some people definitely have moved… but most of us remain. Why?
I don’t have a solid answer. A blogger named Corvida outlined many of the issues in her post “The Problem With Leaving Twitter“. It is all about the community… about the many people you connect with who have, in many cases, become actual “friends”.
I think it’s also about the APIs… for all of its faults, Twitter stands above so many others with the many different ways you can send updates to it… via the API from a ton of different clients… from the web interface… from the mobile interface… from IM (if they ever fix the IM interface)… via voice from Jott or Twitterfone… from your blog site… from other services. The absolute simplicity of the Twitter API has created a whole ecosystem of integration around the service.
It’s also where – at this moment – much of the “conversation” is among the emerging tech / new media / chasers-of-bright-shiny-objects. It’s our virtual water cooler. It’s our “Cheers”… it’s where we hang out.
How much of that conversation will remain, though, is a good question. Each day Twitter seems to try our patience a bit more. At some point we may all reach that pain threshold where we finally say “enough is enough” and move on to somewhere else…
When do we hit that point? I don’t know, exactly, but it’s increasingly seeming like the answer is… SOON!
P.S. You are welcome, of course, to follow me on Twitter when the service is up… as well as on Friendfeed for when it isn’t. 🙂
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I haven’t given up, but I use Twitter from my Blackberry far more than any other interface. SMS is the driver for me.
That said, I’m using Facebook and other tools more and more as Twitter has become unreliable and just doesn’t do the job any more. I fear the funding they got via Jeff Bezos’ investment is just too little to late. Twitter failed to capitalize on their momentum. It seems to simply have become an unrpofitable, non-sustainable prototype upon which others will build new ideas that last.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. There is no real alternative at the moment. FriendFeed – overkill, too much stuff. Jaiku – invitation only, long wordy posts. Plurk – messy interface. As you say Twitter has so much good stuff – if only it worked …
I disagree that twitter is going away anytime soon. Sure, there is a core group of 100,000 heavy twitterers. But the vast majority use it only ocassionally and intermittently, and seeing the FailWhale just means that they should get some other work done for their employer until Twitter comes back. @jyarmis tweeted this morning that Twitter could monetize by having employers pay them to show FailWhale to their employees. Maybe you should ask Voxeo execs if that’s what they are doing to you, but they’d deny it even if they were. 😉
Oh yes, and to access Twitter, I use all of 5 sources, whatever is working/I have access to at the moment: The site itself on my old PowerBook, and Twitterrific; Hahlo, twitter’s mobile version and twitter’s standard version on my iPhone. I used to use PocketTweets a little bit on the iPhone, but don’t any more. I often find that I can’t connect/tweet with Hahlo, so I kick over to Twitter’s own mobile version and view the stream that way.
Speaking of the twitter stream, when is someone going to develop a twitterface that smoothly scrolls in the new tweets in the cool way that tweets should do? 😉
@Ken – Interesting… I hardly ever send via SMS, but I do use Twitterberry on my Blackberry whenever I travel.
@Jonathan – Yes, if only it worked…
@Morriss – I don’t think Twitter is going “away”… there’s too much momentum behind it… but at what point does it just stop being “useful”? Cute idea about showing the FailWhale to employees… regarding Voxeo, we use Twitter as part of our communication, too: http://twitter.com/voxeo
You’re so right about the crack-addiction effect of twitter, but nothing else compares for its water cooler effect out there. I’ve tried all the alternatives, and nothing fits right. Its like a well-worn pair of jeans… they may have holes and be falling apart, but you just can’t part with them.