How I Know Twitter is Something Special
Here’s the key indicator that Twitter is different - it sucks. It really does, look at the list:
1) Unreliable - site is slow to moderately unusable to abhorrent almost all hours of the day. How slow is it? Bush can get through two whole Family Circus comics before the damn page paints.
2) Clients are the victim of API suckage - Twitterific and Snitter are both well designed, useful tools that live precariously at the edge of completely worthless and “Did that tweet ever get sent?” because they must rely on the service issues of the Twitter API
3) Web Interface is mean to me. It seems to find joy in never remembering my login. Ever.
4) SMS seems to kill my iPhone. I turned the flood gates on earlier in the week so I could find out how Merlin Mann likes his waffles no matter where I am, but that SMS deluge leaves my iPhone groggy, tired and makes the speaker cackle like a Christmas Witch. I ultimately had to bail on that.
So after all of this, I can’t seem to let it go. It’s a useful, verging on necessity at this point. And after all of this hassle I still come back to it. Just think of what it would be like if it worked well, for real. That would be cool, until then back to waiting for the damn pages to load and wishing Twitterific would stop filling up with my tweets and show me what other people are saying.
Thanks much for saving me 20 minutes by writing this (I was planning to…).
Reminds me of working with Macromedia Fireworks (been a devoted user since v2). The thing is a piece of buggy crap. But it does stuff nothing else does. I’ve continued to use it… to support it… to always make sure I have it handy. It is really the one piece of non-Apple commercial software I couldn’t get by without.
Twitter goes down all the time and we just keep going back. Nobody else can provide the value it does when it is running.
Some products get away with it, some don’t. I think the Twitter folks are working on these issues, but in end it doesn’t work like it should. But, as you pointed out, the value is great enough that we seem to get over it. Maybe that’s why I’m getting these Pownce invites :)
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