I don’t want to jump on the “twitter keeps crashing” bandwaggon. It’s already pretty full. But man, it’s hard not to.
I just need to remind myself that twitter is free, so I probably need to check my expectations at the door and cut the twitter team some slack. Whatever they’re doing to the code or the servers or whatever, I’m sure it’ll be for the best in the end. Growing pains are just part of the process. We’ve just become so used to things always working pretty well that as soon as something doesn’t, we scream foul. Maybe we just need to chill a little bit, and let nature take its course with twitter. I’ve tried the Plurk thing. Reluctantly. And yeah, I have a plurk account now… but I never use it. I prefer Twitter. Looks like we all do. There must be a reason.
I guess it’s a testament to how important twitter has become to some of us that when it does crash or get hickups, we all get pretty upset about it. It would be like our cell phones or email not working consistently… or our cable TV… or the subway or bus system deciding that on some mornings, people are just going to have to find another way to get to work. None of those things would be good. Except unlike all of the above examples, twitter is 100% free, so… I guess I shouldn’t complain too much, if at all.
Twitter IT guys, please try to fix your problems soon so we all find better things to complain about than “twitter is down again.” More importantly, the sooner you get your problems fixed, the sooner we can get back to our microblogging conversations.
I think it’s time for my Friday morning venti latte now.
Yes, it has been very crazy in recently but I had two very interesting Twitter experiences this morning. I recently started recording our new mission churches sermons on an Edirol Digital Recorder and posting them in a podcast format. This morning while doing a Twitter search I discovered that besides a couple of posts I have made someone in New York was listening on a regular basis.
I also discovered this morning that both my state and the us government are posting updates via twitter.
On the surface it can look useless to a lot of people but when you can do things like search, get updates on events or hear about a podcast being recorded that you can call into you start to see the value.
I’m still not committed to twitter. I use it but not that often. Seems like sometimes it can just be a timewaster.
Anything can be a time waster if not managed correctly. I’m more “committed” to Twitter than the competitors because that’s where the traffic is and maybe that is why they have had so many overload problems recently. I like to think of Twitter (or similar services) as a way to do “personal press releases.” I try not to post the “I’m eating a ham sandwich” kind of post but post something interesting, stuff people would find of value in their own world or can learn from me.
It’s interesting to note that a large amount of traffic to our business web site comes from Twitter as I use a service called Twitterfeed to post updates to twitter when I have updated my blog and I also have been trying service like ping.fm to post to multiple services and social networks. I’m not into wasting time either so I do try to seek out where the traffic is and how it’s working for me.
I do think their is way too much fragmentation in these kind of services. While I love competition I hope some mergers to happen in the near future.