Twitter Sucks; It’s Too Unreliable
It’s now clear to me why Google bought Jaiku instead of Twitter. The reason is simply that Twitter sucks. I’m following a mere 5 users, and I have pruned down the people following me to 2, yet Twitter cannot reliably deliver my messages.
For example, this morning I should have received 3 twits, two of which are weather alerts, and one of which is a message from my girlfriend. In reality, I only received one of the weather alerts, and missed the other two on my phone:
This isn’t just a one-time glitch; I’ve been having trouble receiving twits erratically for the last couple months. If I had to place bets, I’d say that Twitter isn’t scaling properly, or is falling apart from the inside out. After all, if Google bought your biggest-but-still-tiny competitor instead of you, wouldn’t you just give up? Maybe at Twitter there’s no one left at the helm.
Another annoyance is that no matter how hard I try, I keep getting twits from a random person:
I’m not subscribed to their alerts, and additionally I’ve marked them as “blocked” but yet I continue to receive their updates on my phone. I’ve tried everything short of sueing Twitter in civil court to get them to stop, but the alerts continue to flow. If you wonder if I’m alone, I’m not. Someone’s gone to the effort to register http://twittersucks.com, and a quick search for twitter sucks will get you a lot more.
Update: I was going to say that things might be getting better, because yesterday I received both weather updates, but today I only got one.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 2:50 pm and is tagged with weather updates, random person, twits, civil court, google, annoyance, glitch, twitter, helm, competitor, bets, girlfriend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on October 21st, 2007 at 6:23 pm
[…] 2 - Twitter Sucks; It’s Too Unreliable by Elliott C. Back […]
on October 21st, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Hi Elliott,
I’m very sorry you’re having problems with Twitter. I checked our logs, and we delivered all of the messages to T-Mobile. I’m going to do some more checking and will also contact T-Mobile to see what happened on their end.
If you could email me directly about the blocked user, I’ll take a look - I don’t see anything immediately wrong, but there could be a hidden glitch somewhere. I’d be very grateful if we can find it!
on October 24th, 2007 at 2:04 am
That is the problem though you need an invite for everything that isn’t Twitter.
If you don’t have a buddy that has invites left you are out of luck.
I am still on the waiting list myself :-/
on November 10th, 2007 at 9:00 am
[…] I know I complained about the reliability and uptime of Twitter recently, but I’d really like to applaud the designer and company here for producing such clear concise work. I love the washed out colors and ultra-minimalist style. The large type and boxiness also work well. twitter, minimalist style, applaud, concise work, couple screenshots, i don t know, uptime, reliability, colors, and i love […]
on January 14th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Twitter Must Die.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4FuOZQKRtE