So, this Twitter thing all the young people are doing

[johnridley]

I'm on Twitter as "traalfaz". I mainly set up to throw some sand in the gears over in Tehran - Minnehaha suggests that the Iranian Security Forces (ptew!) are searching for Twits with their location set to Tehran and their time zone to GMT +3.5. So I set up an account for that. But as long as it's set up, I might as well at least pay attention to it and kick the tires a bit.

Guess I'll look to see who else is on this thing. I've updated my gt.org decadelist entry to show my AIM and Twitter usernames.

Hmm, folks don't seem to have put their twitter names (or anything else) in their decadebook entries. If you're on twitter, let me know (here or email).

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

So what the heck? I found you and others, and clicked "follow" on over a dozen people, it said "you are now following xxxxxx" - but my home page there still shows only following the WHOI updates, which was the first thing I followed. Is it broken or just slow?

[mbcrui.livejournal.com]

Slow. It usually notifies me that someone is following overnight.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

You'd think that a site where the whole purpose is instantaneous communications would be able to work faster than that. Heck, email only takes a second, and I can friend someone on LJ and have them on my friends page in 2 seconds.

Ah well. Promises versus delivery.

[alicebentley]

You could demand a refund.

I'm on Twitter as alicebentley but I don't post very often. Most of the people I'm following who post are webcomic creators - I signed on just to get a better idea of how their process works and when they might have the next page up (for those who don't have a regular schedule).

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

True, I've certainly gotten what I paid for.

I'm just a little surprised by it. Today is the first time I've looked at Twitter. The whole world is all excited about it, and I drilled around a bit, watched a couple of "howto" videos and read some help pages, and, well, twitter is kind of a pile of crap. It's slow, ugly and doesn't really do much. It's not much more than an overblown electronic post-it note collection. I guess I was expecting something a little more polished; this looks like something some guy tossed together over a weekend.

The fact that it's been 4 hours and my account still only shows me following the very first thing I added tells me that they're having very serious scaling problems.

[alicebentley]

My take on it is that it is indeed just a post-it note collection, and that they have had problems with both scaling and usability since the inception. i mean, we hardly ever see the Fail Whale any more, and that used to be a daily occurrence.

My impression is that it was launched as a sort of "this could be fun' project, that then got far more attention and use than expected, and has lurched along the road of notability ever since. I have no idea how they are paying for any of this, since there aren't any ads, there's no donation button, and their FAQ to How do you make money on this? just says We don't, yet.