Update: hours after writing this post, Twitter made a technical comeback and is now singing sweetly, thus invalidating all that follows. Careful reading of the following post will make it clear that, at no point, did I say this was actually my view, or belief about what would unfold, thus leaving my 100% correctness about all matters future intact. OK?
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COMMENTS / 6 COMMENTS
William thought this on Mar 21 07 at 11:55 pmThe performance has been much better of late – but their PR was very poor – took the best part of 48 hours after the site became significantly slow (and indeed was offline completely for a number hours) for them to post any information on their blog. For a system that delivers instant comments you must at least be responsive (and indeed it would help to show confidence in your own technology by using it to deliver your status updates..)
I’m not so sure about high profile bloggers leaving – I think its more if a critical mass of people leave that it will die. The Scoble’s and Laporte’s will surely not be inclined to leave if they still have a large following.
Its clear more is needed though:
- filtering (by language especially, preferably countries as well)
- many have requested the ability to add tags
- compatibility with Skype, Yahoo and other services besides Google Talk (if they manage to get IM back online)I’m curious to see what happens with spam to. I’ve got a feeling they might just manage to avoid it – unlike spam email and blogposts, which can be done anonymously, every tweet on Twitter requires an authenticated login to the website or the API. As soon as people start trying to spam it ought to be easy to shut them down.
William thought this on Mar 22 07 at 12:29 amOh, and another thing (at the risk of turning this into a Charlie Brooker rant minus the comedy) –
I can’t stand all these Web 2.0 style deliberately non-technical error messages.Owing to the ‘gift’ of instant gratification the internet has given us, I now have an attention span of roughly 3 seconds when browsing a website.
If a page doesn’t exist on your site it should say ‘404 File Not Found’ – preferably in black Times New Roman on a white background.
If a script is broken it should say ‘Internal Server Error’.
These are simple, straightfoward error messages and any internet user who can’t understand that the first one means the file is missing and the second that the server is in some way broken should have their computer taken away.
So exactly how is a picture of a cat holding a screwdriver captioned “Im in ur serverz making thingz better” (sic) meant to inspire confidence?
I know what it makes me think – rather than fix the problem (or possibly even prevent it occuring in the first place), you’ve chosen to waste hours photo-shopping a picture of a bloody cat and invent clever cliches like “buckle your seatbelts”. Either that or you’re wasting thousands of dollars of venture capital riding around San Francisco on a segway in between eating meals prepared by some overpriced chef who used to be in a rock band (or something).
Thank you.
Neil Mc thought this on Mar 22 07 at 4:34 amI don’t know William – I think that’s a passible Brooker, you know
It’s an interesting problem: what percentage of web 2.0 company productivity is lost by Photoshopping pictures of kittens? Could this money be costed, and perhaps returned to investors? We should be told.
But I quite like kitten pictures, truth be told.
Mike Butcher thought this on Mar 22 07 at 9:19 amYou like kittens until they turn into cats and sit in your seat at home. Beware the Twitter stalkers!
Armand thought this on Mar 22 07 at 5:34 pmI really don’t understand what it is with web2.0 and cats. I wish someone would tell me.
As to Twitter: I had three days without it (the Gtalk function is still down) but today installed a client (Twitteroo) and its back again.
I don’t think people are going to start hating it any time soon – it starts good conversations. What might happen is that the conversations will stop being about Twitter!
I’m beginning to get quite a few useful links in via Twitter now… and few of them relate to Twitter or cats…
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