BrockLi Soup

Twitter’s scaling problems are near-legendary. Ever since it really took off last spring at SXSW, it’s been going down for short periods on a near-daily basis. It’s a cliché, but Twitter has been straining under the weight of its own success.

This most recent spate of problems has been especially bad, though. I don’t know if anything in particular happened to cause it, but the IM functionality and pagination have been disabled for most of the past couple weeks. Even then, it just doesn’t work at all a couple times a day when the load is too high.

Unlike so many other people, I’m not complaining. It kind of sucks, but Twitter is a free service - the way I see it, if I haven’t paid them, they don’t owe me jack diddly. People are getting really upset about the downtime, and I don’t understand the sense of entitlement that makes one believe they deserve some level of service from a company that’s doing it for free.

No, I’m actually kind of thankful. The thing I do have in common with the Twitter-bashers is a mild Twitter addiction, and when you can’t see more then the most recent 20 tweets on your friends page, you start to lose interest. I still love Twitter and check it a few times a day, but now I don’t really worry about the ones I miss - if something important happens to someone close to me, I’ll probably hear about it either way. It’s like a little reminder that, hey, there’s more out here than the Internet.

After a long Twitter hiatus, Fonny returned to MICROBLOGGING, and we got to talking about it online.

Fonny: I think Twitter is a little silly personally

Fonny: I’m making fun of my friend who told me that lately he’s been “getting into microblogging”

Brock: that’s like saying concerts are a little silly because you don’t like boy bands

It reminds me of that line in Team America: World Police about “use your acting,” as if “acting” was the solution. A few years ago, people were going on and on about how “blogging” can give your company a good image, and be used for personal branding, and will groom your dog. Now, microblogging will solve everything! And widgets! WEB TWO POINT OH!

I don’t want to name names, but some people I’ve seen around the Internets seem to attribute a lot of power to reasonably abstract concepts. “Blogging” isn’t a thing anyone can really pin down, because it means different things to different people. It’s not a solution, or a problem, or anything specific even - a blog is a means of delivering content, and anyone that tries to give it a more specific or meaningful definition probably doesn’t understand it as well as they think they do, or at least works in marketing.

It drives me nuts when I hear people say things like “blogs are stupid,” because it’s so generic. I think the concert analogy I made to Fonny makes sense: one would sound pretty stupid if they dismissed concerts altogether because they didn’t like a particular band that’s playing. Fine, you don’t like the band, but that doesn’t invalidate the idea of public performance. It’s the same thing with blogs. Fine, maybe you don’t like the way Heather Armstrong writes about her life, but that doesn’t mean blogs are worthless - it means you shouldn’t bother reading dooce. There’s a ton of really good stuff being put out there everyday, and I hate to see people dismiss it all because they’ve only managed to find the crappy parts. The same thing goes for Twitter: there’s a lot of crap, but that doesn’t make the service or the concept inherently worthless.

Anyway, Fonny and I had a nice chat about it, and I don’t mean to imply that he’s one of the people doing this. He just got me thinking about it, and I wanted to include him because really, and how can you not love that face!

So is anyone else using Twitter yet? There’s got to be more people on there that I know, but I haven’t really gone looking for them.

Last night, I posted to Twitter that I think I’d like to move to DuPont when my lease here expires, because I’ve always liked the neighborhood. I got this IM later in the night:

I’ve been told Dupont is the ‘gay’ place. like all the gays live there…just lettin ya know!

To the person who sent it: I’m sorry, there’s no way I can NOT share this (but don’t worry, I won’t name names). I appreciate your concern, but I’ve had my shots, so I don’t think I’ll catch The Gay. I’ll watch my back, though, just in case.

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p>Also, I can’t find the the site with DC shirts, like the “DuPont is Gay” one. Anyone have that bookmarked?

Has anyone else been using this Twitter business? It seems like a cool idea, I just can’t seem to get the damn thing to work right.

The basic idea is that you post what you’re up to - mini blog posts, if you will. You can do it over the web, via IM, or by SMS. And if your friends have requested notifications of your updates, they get an SMS message when you make a post. This (or something like it, with a couple more features) could easily be used for local event notifications - “I’m going to a move tonight, who wants to come?” sort of things.

I’ve only played with it a little bit, but I sent invites to a couple more people so I could have some friends (I’m just so lonely on the Internet). Of course, I can’t even log in to the web interface right now; it was fine this afternoon, but now when I try to get in, it asks me to finish creating my account, and then tells me that my phone number - which isn’t a field I can change at this point - is already in use. I did some looking around online, and it sounds like a lot of people have been having a variety of problems, including this one. Hopefully, the support folks will get me straightened out soon. I can still update it by phone, but I think I’ll use the thing more once they get some bugs fixed. You can play along on my Twitter page.