Twitter Bashing- A Popular Sport Lately

May 21, 2008 · Comments

I’ve been on Twitter since the fairly early days. Pre 2007SXSW, if that gives you a sense. And I give at least one presentation a week, plus DOZENS of conversations in various media spots about the values of Twitter and the benefits. But man, I’m really tired of things not working.

Call this the passion of someone who has grown to appreciate the business implications of what Twitter can do (and has done) for me, who sees several alternatives just sitting here revved up, waiting to take your traffic. No, not Jaiku or Pownce. Puh-leeze. Great teams, but they’re not the right play.

But FriendFeed? There’s a case there. Truly. I posted a new item in FF, and got THAT MANY (see above) comments in seconds. In the time it took me to start typing this, there are 14 19 MORE comments. So it’s alive. Truly.

I look on the twitter streams of the folks running the show and find nothing related. Nothing like, “Um, sorry we’re sucking right now, but we’re going to fix it.” And you know what? It was working better a few weeks ago when certain people were being raked over the coals on the way out the door. Tell you what. I miss Blaine.

What comes next? I’m not ready to bet on this one, because Twitter has somehow kept us all here, even when all these other apps were coming out. They all have some subset of better features, but we’re all on Twitter.

But I dunno, team. FriendFeed, if you can learn to work with the noise, I think this might end up picking up some serious “market share” in the social platforms.

Attention Newcomers to Social Platforms

Tread gently on ditching Twitter for FriendFeed. Read about 100 Louis Gray posts before attempting anything of that nature. Truly. It’s not the same vibe, and doesn’t have the same return on efforts as Twitter (not the same, I’m saying).

And me? I’m still on Twitter. But getting a bit feisty.

You?

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  • I'm right there with you Chris, FF is the first place I go when twitter is down.
  • My participation in today's Twit-Out has clearly shown me that FriendFeed and Twitter are different beasts. In Twitter, you can ask all of your followers a question at once, or you can very easily direct a comment to a single person. FriendFeed is more akin to islands of conversation.
  • Refund, refund, refund!
  • What's to be said about a community that doesn't give-up on a product when it doesn't work. Isn't that the backbone of all entrepreneurial endeavours: People will use things that work and not use things that don't work. Why are we going against the natural order? There are more than enough alternatives out there, friendfeed being one of them. I think it's time to vote with our feet (in the meta sense) and go somewhere else. Otherwise, of course the people who run Twitter aren't going to care, why would they? We're not going to leave, right?
  • Regarding both the noise and reading that Louis Gray guy... I'd say start with one:

    Five Ways To Use the Hide Function
    http://tinyurl.com/6h37zl

    Others:

    Participate. Participate. Participate. Repeat.
    http://tinyurl.com/3tvqe9

    Elite Bloggers Joining FriendFeed In Droves
    http://tinyurl.com/322mh9
  • I'm going to start heading over there. It's time for me to start giving my FF some love.

    It was fine for Twitter to go down before, but it's reaching a critical mass point where outages just aren't acceptable and you're going to lose a lot of the non-early adopters. You know the folks I'm talking about-- the ones that pay the bills.

    When there is a website to tell if a service is down or not, it's a service on the way out.

    To quote my tweet when twitter was down, "Twitter down.... AGAIN!?!_!__!(O!(@!()!"

    And does Twitter take a while to load for anyone else, or is it my office?
  • mdy
    Picture a small boat in the middle of the ocean that a lot of people are trying to get on, while its captain and crew are trying to steer it *and* transform it into a large ship that can accommodate everybody, all at the same time.

    That's kinda how I see Twitter.

    I guess that's why I am more tolerant when the 'ship' is just dead in the water some days. :)
  • @mdy - I agree and empathize with Team Twitter, but the lack of communication to its users about what they're experiencing it the real turn off. Twitter is a communication tool, but as far as I know, no one from Twitter is communicating the assumed growing pains to the user base. Keep up the radio silence and the exodus to FriendFeed will continue. Lord knows, many of us are turning to it.

    http://friendfeed.com/adjustafresh
  • Look, FriendFeed is nice but it is NOT a Twitter replacement. Twitter's utility is its brevity and ubiquity.

    I can use Twitter just fine from my Blackberry while Caltrain, in an airport, or even out at dinner. Not so for FF.
  • Tawny Press
    Sticking it out on Twitter. Feel for the developers and hope they find funding soon. Also agree, they need to find a better way to communicate. Most can excuse the temporary glitches, if it is followed with good communication.
  • RBL
    Twitter is crack for the socially connected. No matter how bad it gets, you still come back for more.

    BTW, I understand Twitter is a RoR+MySQL app. What does that say about scalability, availability, and reliability of RoR+MySQL? Maybe they shoulda' built it in ASP.Net or Java.
  • Howard Greenstein
    But when Twitter is down, how do you twitter about it?
  • Chris,

    What exactly do you have against Jaiku and Pownce? I've been on all the alternatives like yourself and agree they have their pluses and minuses. But both of these services recognize the fact that you need to filter conversations somehow, either by grouping topics or sets of friends.

    If it's the lack of a critical mass of users on those services, I'd say it's like ditching the big city for a small town in Iowa... the peace and quiet might be just the ticket! ;)
  • Chris,

    I don't have the history you have with Twitter, but I have really come to appreciate the whole experience, implications, connections, etc. And I REALLY like the simplicity and lack of external noise. Having said that, I'm concerned about what happens if Twitter doesn't get it right -soon. And I don't follow thousands/have thousands of followers like you and others.

    So, I'm promoting my FriendFeed link on Twitter in hopes that if Twitter crashes and goes away tomorrow, we'll somehow be able to find one another. http://friendfeed.com/cherylsmith999

    Thanks for verbalizing what we've all been thinking!

    P.S. Btw, @ev posted "still having problems" 31 minutes ago...
  • Meg
    I'm going to stick with it, but it's really not my bread and butter like it seems to be for some of you. For me, it's just communicating and connecting, and I am happy to make due with IM, texting, email and phone when it's not working.

    If everyone goes to Friend Feed, I guess I'll just blog more. :)
  • I understand the 'what' of FF, but I haven't been able to figure out the 'why' or 'how'. What I mean is, I know what FF does, but not how best to use it.

    Twitter is easy. I can connect with others, post questions, get feedback, make contacts, arrange meetings, etc...
  • Look, Twitter is what it is -- wonderful yet buggy. I think we all just have to deal with it. Let's make it a drinking game -- everytime Twitter goes down, everyone has a drink. At least it'll make the waiting more relaxed.
  • Twitter will live. We won't all run away. Inertia is a beautiful thing. But we're bothered. Don't discount that.
  • I haven't tried friend feed, Twitter is such a great system I'm loath to get distracted with something else, or turn my attention away from the people I've got to know there.

    But the last few days have been extremely frustrating and will risk people turning away from it.

    There are so many people invested in it - people who know how to make this kind of stuff work, how to make it better, how to turn it into a model that's sustainable for the people who run it and the people that enjoy using it - are the folks at Twitter tapping into the community they've got sitting around waiting for them to get it fixed?

    joanna
  • Twitter is just in trouble all over
  • I had to give a presentation about Twitter to folks at Stanford yesterday. I knew in advance that Twitter was bound to be down and it was at time I started. Presentation was missing a demo and thus, less effective.

    But I was thinking about 30 minutes before I had to start that -- "This stupid service never stays up and I'm recommending a strategy utilizing twitter to Stanford University? Am I crazy or just dumb?"

    anyway...this tweet about sums up what I think
    http://twitter.com/jjtoothman/statuses/817112401

    but who knows if Twitter will be up so you can see that.
  • Do you think that this post got the Twitter folks to release their statement? My money says Yes.
  • My oldest boy is on FriendFeed - he got there before I did!
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