August 4, 2008
It’s too early to go back to Twitter
For a while, I’ve made very little use of Twitter. The reasons are familiar:
- COMMON outages.
- Temporary disabling of the Replies feature.
- General lessening of the discussion, as other people stay away too.
Back from vacation, I just tried again. My experiences include:
- Continuing unreliability (e.g., visits from the “Fail Whale).
- New forms of unreliability. E.g., I just tried to Follow a new person for the first time in quite a while, and was told that I was “over my limit”. And Twitter seems to recently have banned some heavy, more or less core users. (Edit: Here’s another post that’s even clearer about the problem.)
- The same low level of response to my tweets, compared with what I would probably have had some months ago.
- A search function (thanks to the Summize acquisition) that returns the last 50 or so tweets which include the keywords of your choice. Because of the limited number of results, any kind of spam quickly clogs them up. Example — there’s some Twitter account that tweets links to blog posts about database-related topics, and so if you search on DATAllegro you already don’t see my original tweets on the Microsoft/DATAllegro deal. So while search is a nice feature, it’s not a magic potion that cures the other problems.
I don’t see the point of trying to use Twitter right now. Its big virtue is supposed to be ease of use, but with these problems use is actually anything but easy.
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