Why Twitter Will Never Happen
Twitter had a good run. But I think it will never be more than a novelty.
I signed up for it for the sole purpose of being able to use Sandy through an IM interface. But Twitter’s IM service went down on May 23 and hasn’t been back up since.
The folks who run Twitter just don’t seem to care. And it’s sad really. It looks like a lot of people want to give Twitter a chance to really catch on. It had the chance to be the next Facebook, something on the web that completely changes the way things work.
But really, how can you trust/rely on a company that seems to thumb their colletive noses at the users? It’s been almost 2 months since Twitter’s IM bot went offline. Two months of cery scattered “We’re working on it”s. 2 months of avoiding even talking about the issue.
Really, I’ve had it. I don’t care if this is a free thing. If WordPress was free and has this sort of service, nobody would use it. MySpace has this sort of service, and people are starting to leave in droves. This makes Wal-Mart’s tendancy to have roughly 2% of its registers open look really good.
I wanted Twitter to work. I really did. But if this is the sort of service that Twitter will provide, I can happily move onto something else.
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Comments
@Tim Owens - I’ve waited a few days on purpose to reply to this to see what happened with Twitter. It’s not good.
I think the loss of followers and the way they handled it was atrocious. I understand that things happen. And that’s ok. I understand that sometimes it takes longer than expected to get things done.
What I don’t like though is when I’m told it will take a few hours to get something to work and it ends up taking almost an entire day. Or when something is a top priority and it’s still not working over 2 months later.
Consider multiple social nets like I do. I post via ping.fm, which hits Twitter, identi.ca (soon to be my favorite), myspace, facebook, plurk, linkedin, etc.
At least, if one is down, the others still get your message.
If you prefer, you can use hellotxt.com instead of ping.fm. hellotxt.com supports pretty much the same nets as ping.fm and works the same way.
If I ever get an invite to SocialThing, I’ll let you know how that works.
I hear you, I miss IM for the fact that it used to keep my Facebook status synced up with what I had on Twitter which meant everyone I knew (most of which are on Facebook) kept up-to-date. Twitter has done so many things right in terms of user interface, it’s a shame they can’t go the final step and fix the broken parts. They recently joined up with Summize to offer search.twitter.com which fills a void that was there but it leaves a sour taste in my mouth when the only innovation coming out of Twitter is buying out startups that actually do the innovation and then integrating it in their service.
At this point it has a lot of brand recognition though so I don’t think we’re going to see people drop away in mass droves, however if the service continues to be sub-par it very well could just die a slow and painful death (or become irrelevant like Friendster).