.Bard

So, for those of you that haven’t noticed: Twitter is pretty much hosed.

See:
the getsatisfaction thread and
Twitter FAIL Day 3: Communications Breakdown

You may have this problem, and have yet to realize. In fact, I’d say that the majority of people who have this problem don’t know they have it (as the problem appears to be systemic, and there are only 272 people so far watching that thread).

Ok, so, if it’s documented, and twitter are apparently working on it, the question has to be asked: Why am I here bitching about it? Haven’t the twitter guys stated they’re working on it? Isn’t twitter a free service anyway, thus rendering them immune to claims of “bad service” based on the fact that we’re only really getting what we’re paying for.

Well.

Apart from registering myself as one of the few, the proud, the affected on getsatisfaction.com, and the occasional bitchy tweet on the topic, I’ve sat idly by. Mainly because I expected not only some sort of real communication on the topic from the twitter people, but also a quick resolution, as the whole problem seemed to have been an after-effect of the planned outage they undertook on the weekend (and, we’ve all been there). This, by the way, echoes the sentiments of a lot of people on getsatisfaction: Hello? Rollback?

Finally, though, after reading a reply to the thread on getsatisfaction by one mhutchin I started to get my back up. I became inspired by my annoyance and that of the other people on the thread. The thing that really started to bug me, though, was communication, or, the lack thereof. Aside from the ONE response to that thread, twitter have officially said nothing about this issue. This ires me greatly, particularly coming from a company who base their entire success or failure on the use of the software they write as a communication tool. It’s not as though they don’t know how to reach us all, basically. The thing that still amazes me is that a lot of my followers and some people I follow -- including some very “high profile” (read, lots of followers) people -- still seem to be only just finding out about the problem.. TWO DAYS ON. This is largely because twitter themselves appear to be living in some sort of vacuum (think of an ostrich, with it’s head in the sand).

As a long-time sysadmin, and sometimes developer, I know all too well the value of communication. It’s amazing what you can get away with in terms of outages, and things being horribly broken, as long as you keep patting the users on their collective head and telling them it’s all going to be all right, whether you really believe it or not. I’m not talking about lying, per se. It’s not about the message, it’s about people’s perceptions. If you’re still talking, and reassuring people, they feel loved, they feel looked-after, and they feel like their own personal concerns are being addressed. This last point is of particular import where twitter is concerned. Twitter has become something very much like what I’m sure the original developers wanted: It’s become an important personal communication tool. Microblogging isn’t like ‘blogging. It’s something much more up-to-the-minute and personal. It’s a shared conversation. It’s IM and ‘blogging combined. What’s worse, it creeps into your life in a very pervasive way that few other tools can (I’ve never sat across from my wife at dinner and commented on a blog, but I assure you that in the early stages of my fascination with twitter this happened on more than one occasion, with a tweet that arrived to my phone, much to her chagrin - and I’m sure I’m not the only guilty one there). We, the constant users of twitter, have become an army, much like those annoying kids with SMS messaging on their phones. We’re addicted, we’re engaged, and we’re starting to get a little unruly. We want action, or at least the appearance of it, and we want it now.

Thus, to twitter.com I have this to say, finally:

Pat us on the head, patronize us if you must, just please let us know we still matter, and that we can continue our shared conversation soon. The simple fact is that what you’ve created can be great, and that it’s shown us a method of communication that we enjoy, and that has become very important to us. The unfortunate reality is that now that we’ve had a taste, we’re going to continue this conversation, this interaction. The question remains whether it will be through your service, or through any of the hundreds waiting in the wings to scoop up a bitter, disillusioned user base for themselves.

UPDATE:
Twitter have finally publicized the outage with a link from their homepage and a blog post. This is exactly what we needed. Also, the word is getting out! Look here and here. Also, the number of people following the thread on getsatisfaction doubled over night! I’m glad to see that people are aware of the problem now.

UPDATE:
FIXED, apparently! Thanks to all at twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.