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Up until recently, my only exposure to Twitter had been through this Penny Arcade comic strip. However, being an avid study of social networks, online communities, and all things new and geeky - I jumped in and created an account and started Twittering. My initial thoughts on day 1 were that it was a waste of my time. I figured nobody needed to know what the hell I was doing and really I didn't need to know what anybody else was doing that I couldn't get from a blog.
Here's teh good:
Then I started to get the micro-news concept and really started gaining some actual, tangible benefit from following certain people. Then the Phoenix Mars landing came up and I was able to follow the landing on Twitter - that was awesome and truly hammered home why I like Twitter and what I use it for. That's the good part. It's a really good, really innovative idea that has a lot of merit and can, given a few changes, even be useful in an enterprise setting.
And here's teh suq:
The implementation of Twitter (for which the Twitter folks have already apologized and indicated they are working on feverishly) is piss-poor. It's an absolutely horrible implementation of a web-based service. Every single client application that I have used for Windows or for the Mac has beenan abject failure. Some of the clients had really bad GUIs, but that's something I expect. However, even the clients that were written fabulously well suffered because the Twitter API was either unavailable, or worse, it was available and returning 0 records for every single query.
Then when I get fed up with waiting until the clients (including sidebar gadgets and Dashboard widgets) actually start working, I head to the source and go to Twitter.com. This is when it gets worse. Refreshing my home page often removes some of my recent news. Some news doesn't appear that should (I know it should because I have to manually go to individual twitter pages of people I'm following to get their Tweets sometimes). Worse, I regularly (as in 2-3 times per day) get the page indicating that there are so many tweets that Twitter is unavailable. Yes, it's great that they have so much activity, but Twitter has been around for long enough that the fact that they don't have infrastructure to support their current user base is inexcusable.
Given all the bad implementation crap, Twitter is still useful enough for me to stick out the rough times. I know they're working on improvements and they've recently hired a bunch of engineers (some of whom I think came from Google, who might know a thing or two about high volume coding), so if the implementation gets better and I can actually get a client that gives me 5-second fading toasts instead of an annoying window that takes up 50% of my damn screen space (Yeah, I'm talking about you, Twitterific), then I will fully embrace this new shiny Twitter thing.
As a side note, I am going to be twittering from WWDC to see how that works out. Not only will I be twittering the keynote, but I'll also be twittering to make it easy for people to find me to talk about all things geeky and to find my lab sessions and my presentation as well. The results of that experiment will really cement whether I will stick with Twitter or drop it like another fad.
What I can't figure out is why the Twitter community is so vociferously
indignant about these QoS issues. Twitter's current state only tells is
that an idea thrown together by a couple of guys one weekend doesn't scale
well in the face of unexpected popularity. Seriously, the 14+ million
BlackBerry users don't complain nearly as much about RIM's too-frequent
outages, and most of them are enterprise users! I use Twitter myself, but I
still don't understand why this relatively small community takes it so
personally when they can't tell their friends about the awesome grilled
cheese sandwich they just had for a few minutes.
Mostly because I couldn't give a rats ass about who ate a grilled cheese.
Some of us are actually using Twitter to get useful information from people
that are in places we cannot be, and who can provide that information in a
more timely fashion than when composing a big blog. There are a bunch of
folks I'm following that are at Tech-Ed right now... It will probably be
several days before any of them compile their thoughts into a blog post, if
at all. Using Twitter, I can get "live" information from the keynote in a
very passive fashion. If Twitter isn't doing its job, I don't get that
information and I don't get the information when it was meaningful. If the
outage lasts for an extended period of time, the quick burst nature of why
people like Twitter is completely undone. And to be honest, the reason
people don't complain about their Blackberry outages is _because_ it's
enterprise software - the are apologists trained to be complacent about
shitty software and bad service. People using Twitter are not apologists,
they are rabid consumers of new technology and they, more than any other
crowd, demand that if you put something up for everyone to use that it must
also work as advertised.
I am going to stick with Twitter, because I have confidence that eventually
they will get this sorted out.
As I said, I plan on waiting it out as well, but I'm not going to make
excuses for them. They knew about the explosive growth long ago and didn't
do anything to re-architect the system to handle the additional load. As
another commenter said, this is basically a symptom of the fact that this
thing was cooked up in the basement of someone's house and suddenly became
popular and people really had no idea what to do with it. Now that it has
some actual professional support, it might begin to resemble reliable and
scalable.
Kevin - they may have known about their problems for some time, but there's
a difference between that and being able to implement the sort of
infrastructure they're going to need to.
I disagree about BB users being apologists. They complain plenty, but
somehow without the shrill pitch of entitlement that some Twitter "victims"
emit. Given that Twitter acknowledges its problems and openly discusses
what's being done to remedy them, I still feel that the most rabid whiners
are armchair architects and programmers who simply like the sound of their
own voice. Present company excluded, of course.
