Twitter Bashing

It seems this is the month for the haters to get out of the woods and crank up the bashing against Twitter. It is one hell of an idea, with a horrible execution. The powers-that-be have figured out that instead of letting it crash hard, they can turn off certain features, so the service stays up in a stripped-down fashion. I actually approve of this, but only if it is done by design.

Plus what the hell, it is a business decision, they are trying to trade outages for (user) outrage. People will complain no matter what you do.

There is also a lot of noise making the rounds about their choice for the technologies used to build and run Twitter. I know almost zero about Ruby on Rails, and I am a card-carrying Microsoft-dot-whore that also happens to be a fan of PHP and Perl, so I can't really tell what is going on there except that two of the most powerful websites that I know, Fark and Slashdot, never seem to go down and both are built on older but proven technologies.

It is obvious that they have growing pains to deal with, but I am hoping that this is not the engineers wearing blinders and insisting on a technology just because they want to do it and not because it is the right thing to use.

On top of this, there are also some challengers that are ready to take advantage of all of this turmoil. Just last night I was checking FriendFeed, and I am impressed enough that I set up an account.

I was using a similar service in the past, but it was pure aggregation, while FriendFeed allows me to post directly to it, plus pulling a lot of the stuff I do in other sites.

Kickass.

Am I going to dump Twitter? Nah. I'm a Twitter Shitter, I can't go back from that, and a few of my friends actually started using Twitter just because of that comic. I really like it because sometimes I want to post something here and all I have is a sentence or two, and I don't like to throw stuff in the blog unless it is semi-readable.