Apr 21
4 Reasons I Would Leave Twitter
RELIABILITY
This is the biggest issue facing Twitter at the moment. The latest saga in the ongoing drama was in the last 24 hours with people’s tweets not appearing in their follower’s timeline due to caching glitches. Previously, Twitter has notably collapsed during Steve Job’s keynote at MacWorld and a monster 12+ hour outage over 28th/29th December 2007.
The reliability, or specifically - lack of it, is starting to grate on users with the usual “Is Twitter Borked?” cry resounding from the blogosphere whenever Twitter chucks a wobbly. Personally, I can understand that the admins have to unplug Twitter every now and then to back up databases and for routine maintenance, however, each time Twitter starts to crumble unexpectedly due to a bug or high demand, it tarnishes their shiny Web 2.0 brand image and increases user’s frustration. There has been a numerous times when Twitter would have been handy for me, yet unfortunately, they were experiencing “technical difficulties”.
SPAM
Twitter is experiencing rapid growth in spam accounts. These accounts generally are easy to spot - they will be following thousands of people, have around four or five people following them back and only around eight updates. The spammers then fill their timeline with links promoting their product in the off chance that someone will click. Twitter needs to curtail this trend of bogus and bot run accounts while continuing to provide an engaging user experience. No one likes to open their email in the morning to find out that buyshoes, bywrinklecream2 and weddingrings are now following you. Sure, you can turn that email feature off but I like to follow back real people and know who is keeping an eye on my timeline. Perhaps CAPTCHA’s need to be implemented to follow a new person? Also - just as an observation, I occasionally make it on to Tweeterboard’s Top 100 and when I do, it is generally followed by a noticeable rise in spam accounts following me.
ADVERTISING
Twitter currently has no clear revenue raising model at the moment. There were cries of exasperation and confusion when Google turned their back on Twitter and bought Jaiku mid 2007. Since then, Jaiku, under Google’s administration has stagnated and virtually died while Twitter has gone from strength to strength and currently is the pioneer in microblogging services. One school of thought on how to moneytize Twitter is the placing of contextual advertisements relating to your tweets on the web interface and via text messages. Another model for monetization is the introduction of premium accounts where, for a nominal fee, you can utilize Twitter advertisement free. International users, currently limited to 250 SMS updates a week, could pay to receive unlimited text message tweets. Twitter needs to think carefully about any form of monetization. If implemented crudely and without foresight Twitter would lose a large chunk of their user base.
CENSORSHIP
I can’t see this happening anytime soon, yet it is impossible to rule out - and if it does occur, I’ll be out the door faster than a dealer in a raid. Although I’m yet to learn of any cease and desist letters against Twitter for linking to copyrighted material, what I am specifically talking about is the censorship of words. Websites such as Yahoo! Answers and most recently Digg, censor users comments if they contain “unsavory” words. If I want to use the word “asshole” in a tweet I should be able to do so without the Twitter police censoring it to, “Damnit, that guy was such an *******“.
I am old enough and damn good looking enough to handle such language. If the person following me objects to anything I post they can simply unfollow me - and likewise if I find someone twittering subject matter I find offensive. If Twitter ever does decided to act as a Nanny and censor people tweets, it will be a sad day for not only Twitter, but the internet itself. With the Beijing Olympics in a few months, this will be an interesting topic to keep your eye on. What if China blocked access to Twitter for the duration of the Olympic Games? No live scores for you via Twitter, eh?
What other reasons could lead you to abandoning Twitter? Anything that specifically annoys you about it?
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4 Comments so far
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If that last one comes to fruition, I’m fucked!
I would pay to use Twitter - but only if they actually got a reliable service happening. The outage on the weekend during BarCampCanberra was very frustrating - prevented me from notifying followers/attendees of meeting schedules and announcements and also inhibited a presentation about Twitter as we couldn’t have a live demo.
It’s spelt arsehloe, not asshole.
Wouldn’t have the first fucking clue about Twitter…but if you want to catch up with an old mate then send him an email…now!!