My thoughts on Twitter’s problems

Saturday, May 31 2008

If you’re using Twitter – you’ve most likely noticed lots of issues and downtime with the service. Essentially Twitter is having a hard time dealing with the large amount of usage it is seeing these days. A developer for Twitter did a Q&A answering people’s questions and mentioned that “power users” of Twitter were causing many of the issues with the service – which led to somehow people thinking he was blaming Robert Scoble. Of course the blame wasn’t at any single “power user” specifically and the dudes at Twitter invited Scoble over to “clear the air”. Read Scoble’s post, transcript, and video here. Now Michael Arrington is calling Twitter out with some questions of his own – which are pretty interesting questions to say the least. Overall – this weekend is bringing some interesting discussion with the community and Twitter regarding the service’s problems.

These problems Twitter is having completely sucks. Twhirl keeps telling me I’ve “exceeded the limit” of tweets I can receive when I’ve not had the client running on any PC for many hours. Or Twhirl simply just can’t connect to Twitter at all. I can’t get Witty to work at all with Twitter but I’m not sure if its Witty or Twitter. When Twitter is working – it does so without some of its features like being able to browse to previous pages when accessing Twitter on a mobile device. It is a hassle to use Twitter today unfortunately.

But what keeps me on Twitter today?

Honestly I really appreciate the openess the Twitter folks have with the community and their problems. They admit Twitter has some major issues and are making a honest effort to fix those issues and are even going as far as explaining how they are looking to fix the problems. This kind of communication makes “toughing-it-out” when Twitter hits major issues a lot easier – at least for me.

I also believe that because of today’s problems – Twitter will eventually become a much better service in the long term.

Of course its the pain of getting through the short term of major issues that is becoming harder and harder to deal with.

Someplace it says we may be having major issues with Twitter for months until they fix the issue. Will I continue to say and use the service? We’ll see. This is a topic I’ll need to re-approach in a couple of weeks/months and see where things are with Twitter and how well the Twitter folks have communicated with us about the issues. But I’m not quite ready to give up on Twitter today.

UPDATE: Twitter responded to Mike Arrington’s questions here.

Tags: twitter, downtime, online, services, social-networking, opinion