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Twitter hanging in there…

July 8, 2008 at 4:57 pm | Posted in Tech | Leave a comment
Tags: friendfeed, jaiku, scalability, twitter

It seems I may have spoken too soon. Despite the proliferation of “Twitter Killers”. Twitter is managing to weather it’s scalability crisis and is actually pulling ahead of the problem. (Congrats guys) Hopefully we will soon see the return of IM functionality and then Track (I miss both).

I’ve been checking out other “MicroBlogging” sites (Jaiku, identi.ca, plurk, Friendfeed) of them I think Friendfeed is the one that twitter needs to worry about most .. but not until Friendfeed gets features like desktop clients and mobile/sms support.

It seems Twitter may well pull a rabbit out of it’s hat and manage to keep it’s throne. Again Congrats Guys

The demise of Twitter?

June 29, 2008 at 11:19 am | Posted in Tech | 1 Comment
Tags: dead, demise, jaiku, outtage, twitter

As I sit here, once again frustrated with Twitter and the continual problems they seem to be having in scaling up their service, I find myself wondering, “Am I watching the demise of Twitter?”.

I think it is a well established fact that the Internet crowd is a fairly impatient lot. Easily frustrated with outages, and very intolerant of things only “half working”. Unfortunately for Twitter this describes the current state of affairs, And sadly the state of affairs for the past while.

The folks at Twitter keep asking their loyal fans to “bear with them” while they do upgrades and try to stabilize the system. People have stuck in there so far, out of their love for Twitter. However after putting up with reduced service for weeks I now find a massive outage. I find myself thinking, “what? after all this work, the system can’t even function correctly with half of it services turned off?”.

Clearly Twitter has a Major problem going on and one that isn’t going to go away in another week or two. With Twitter like sites (jaiku.com) on the horizon people may start diving overboard like the proverbial rats on a sinking ship.

IMHO, Twitter needs to do something big, something substantial, and soon. (Trust me if I were Google I’d be giving serious consideration to throwing Jaiku into open beta just to vacuum up the disenchanted Twitter users.).

Don’t get me wrong I really enjoy Twitter, when it works. The problem is when I’m wanting that update, and find that twitter is yet again down.. It gets frustration, The fact that IM updates haven’t worked for a while now, is frustrating. And I like most denizens of the Net don’t deal well with frustration.

Twitter… Grrrr

June 28, 2008 at 5:07 pm | Posted in Life | 2 Comments
Tags: invite, jaiku, twitter

Man Twitter is just struggling these days. I’d love to try out Jaiku but need an invite. If anyone has some I’d really appreciate it you could send one to jaikume@drop.io

Thanks in advance

—- Update —-

Got an invite and I’m getting set up on Jaiku! Much Thanks to Gavin Brock for the invite. Once I get set up I’ll figure out the best way to distribute the invites I get to dispense

Site of the Week #10

June 7, 2008 at 3:39 pm | Posted in site of the week | Leave a comment
Tags: down, site of the week, twitter

Well this weeks “Site of the Week” is a small but useful site.. It has saved me frustration many times by answering one simple question “is twitter down“

istwitterdown.com isn’t fancy. it’s not big, it doesn’t make french toast.. but when your twitter gadget seems stuck and you not sure why it sure is nice to have a site like this.

Enjoy

Site of the Week #9

May 18, 2008 at 9:59 am | Posted in site of the week | Leave a comment
Tags: mashup, site of the week, twitter

I know I missed the site of the week last week. Sorry about that. The site of the week for this week is another Twitter related site.

the site is:

Twistori

Twistori is a site that watches Twitter posts for ones containing one of five key word, Love, hate, think, believe, feel. and then print them out. So if you are watching the “Love” list you see a continuous list of people talking about things they love. The site is very engrossing is a strange voyeuristic kind of way.

It is definitely worth a few minutes to check it out and I blelieve that it will make int into may peoples bookmarks.

Site of the Week #6

April 19, 2008 at 9:33 am | Posted in site of the week | Leave a comment
Tags: communication, site of the week, social networking, staying in touch, twitter

This weeks site of the week is actually a bit of a combination of sites, but they are at least closely related sites.

The main Site of the week for this week is Twitter. To most of my readers twitter.com is probably not new, or at least it wont be something that they haven’t heard of.

So, Why Twitter? Well I finally had the time to actually check it out this week. I must admit that before actually taking the time to try it out I was leaning towards the “Really?, Why?” camp. However, with actually trying it out I can certainly see what the buzz is about.

I think it is important to mention that it it not Twitter alone that makes it what it is, but how Twitter interacts with other applications. There are browser plug-ins for Twitter like TwitterFox. There are cool Twitter related websites like TwitterVision. There are Twittering applications of every make and flavour.

In my opinion it is this openness to integrate with other application that is a large part of what makes twitter what it is. With so many twittering options it is very simple to stay in touch

Twitter also has some unsung features like the “track” option which lets you track tweets containing a certain name or word. This is very useful for staying tuned into what is going on with a certain subject.

I would also like to point out that Twitter’s sign-up is one of the least invasive I’ve seen and their Terms of Service and privacy policy are both exceedingly reasonable. (One of the main reasons I do not have a FaceBook or MySpace account is due to the overly invasive sign-up pages and the less then amiable Privacy policies they have)

So as I usually say, Go, check it out for yourself. But in this case, don’t just check out twitter.com spend a little time checking out all the cool things that work with Twitter, and some of the features of Twitter like “track”