Twitter Adds Features Whilst Users Gnash Teeth
1st of September 2007 by conor
The Irish Twittosphere grows daily and has been attracting users far outside the initial cabal of geeks. The performance and scaling issues of earlier in the summer have been forgiven and generally the site has been stable. However in the past week much more serious problems have started happening.
We are getting multiple reports of users seeing gaps of of between 4 and 12 hours in the updates from those they are following. Unlike the usual out-of-order messing that people seem to accept, these are black holes which are never re-filled. At the moment I've had no network updates for 4 hours and I'm in contact with two users who have had none for three days! The RSS feeds are similarly broken.
So far, Twitter has seemed resilient to user defection, I have to wonder how long that will continue. I would be quite happy to move completely to Jaiku if (and it's a big if) my network did too. Keep a close eye on all of those articles about social network portability.
Meanwhile, if you too are frustrated with the silence on Twitter, you can find me over on Jaiku where you'll also find several Irish specific channels.
Comment posted by blognation UK Technology Blog Archive Twitters Latest Feature Is B[ol]locks
at 9/2/2007 10:02:37 AM
[] Having tried it, I am none the wiser. If you know how I am supposed to benefit from this feature please can you let me know? Instead of this pointless rubbish, I wish twitter would focus its recent investment on making its service more reliable. []
Comment posted by James Corbett
at 9/1/2007 11:48:09 AM
That really is the big if Conor and the reason I can't see why any social network should be in a rush to open up the social graph unless forced into a corner by the competition.
I've run a niche sports website for 9 years which is mainly based around a discussion forum. You might call it a Social Network 0.5. What we've learned in that time is that, as long as you don't completely drop the ball, a social network is amazingly resilient to mass migration. We know because we've had several threats of mutiny after, regrettably, being forced to ban a few members along the way. Though a few of those threats gather a reasonably large amount of support none succeeded because none of our competing communities had anything like the number of members or volume of user generated content. To revive a cliche from Web 1.0 we really did have first mover advantage.
I too would be more than happy to leave Twitter for good in favour of Jaiku. But unless 50+% of my contacts do at the same time I'm unlikely to do so.