I take back what I said yesterday.

Last night, a developer from Twitter wrote in a Q&A on their blog that the service goes down “generally when ‘popular’ users - that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they’re following - perform a number of actions in rapid succession.”

It’s basically a big F-U to the most popular Twitterers.

Now I know it must be frustrating for the folks over at Twitter to have all of these “popular” users calling them out on a daily basis. And however ridiculous it may seem for a single person to have 20,000+ followers, this is the state of their technology. Blaming their users is bad call, especially the ones that have the strongest voice. Bad Twitter.

They need to think before they talk and work with their users instead of against them. Sheesh.

twitter

The flood of activity on Twitter has caused consistent problems for the service over the last few months. The site has gone down almost daily, causing members some members to ditch the service while others are going up in arms.

Yesterday Steve Rubel said he’s been hanging out at FriendFeed rather than dealing with the downtime. For months, a slew of people have pushed for Twitter to adopt some sort of monetization strategy to help the micro-blogging service with infrastructure issues. Last week Duncan Riley said its time to move on, urging people to help FriendFeed kill Twitter. Yesterday Jim Long told us we were all crazy for going back after all of the problems.

It’s getting ridiculous. Yes Twitter has gone down during crucial times, but I think we need to give them a little breathing room. Last week, Robert Scoble noticed that they were taking steps to alleviate some of the stress on their system. Yes, it’s just sticking a band-aid on an artery wound, but it’s a step in the right direction.

And let’s be real about this, no one is actually dying when Twitter goes down. Twitter has given us a lot so far and I think we owe it to those twits to let them try to work it out. (Although planning some sort of exit timetable might be in order.)
And, since Twitter is currently down, I have the time to actually write a blog post (which may or may not be a good thing. I’ll leave that up to you to decide.)

downtime, FriendFeed, Long, Riley, Rubel, Scoble, twitter

If you were at all like me, your first day in high school consisted of you walking the halls, wide-eyed, trying to get your bearings without upsetting any upperclassmen. It was overwhelming. But eventually a routine becomes placed, a core group of friends is found and the learning begins.

Twitter is a lot like high school. People go to it, for no other reason than they think they should but once it’s given a chance the value is discovered. But you have to work at it. You have to seek out friends, follow them and contribute to the conversations.

Tread lightly though, your reputation is at stake. People will read what you post and if you slip up, it’s likened to tripping in the lunch line at a crowded cafeteria. The good thing is, people have short memories these days, so most embarrassing moments are soon forgotten. But sometimes something so bad happens you have to switch schools.

There’s also a wide range of characters on Twitter. The geeks, the bully, the jocks and the cool kid and the class clown. If you’re careful you can get a steady stream of information that ranges from the completely inane to actually handy. It all depends on which crowd you run with.

New Media, reputation, social media, twitter, value