CNET: Announcing the Totally Unofficial Build a Better Twitter Contest:
I have had it with this Twitter situation. I know it’s a free service, and I know that a lot of you are frankly sick of hearing about it, but I cannot keep pretending that Twitter is the savior of the modern Internet, the message-bearing standard of Web 2.0, and the most important thing to happen to online communication since Gopher when the site itself is only slightly more reliable than a late-model Saab. And I’m sorry, but being down all the time is not excused by the fact that people who think they’re cool think Twitter is cool. Therefore, I would like to hereby officially announce the Totally Unofficial Build a Better Twitter Contest.
I’m certain that the Twitter folks know what a problem they have. The question is whether they’re going to make the service reliable soon enough.
The opening for a better Twitter is real. The other question is whether anyone can exploit it.
on May 20th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Rather than asking someone to exploit it for their profit, why not, in the spirit of the open-source community, suggest that some folks collaborate on an open standard? Such an open standard would not be dependent on a particular web site. It wouldn’t be at the mercy of a particular vendor. It could be readily implemented by every social networking host, portable internet device, and a range of other access points that nobody has thought of. That’s the way to build a better bird cage.
on May 20th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Right now, twitter does have issues, but so did blogging. In time things will get better with twitter because there are lot of people and corporations want twitter to work. Companies want to communicate with their customers. Twitter is a lot better then IM and a chatroom. One can control who reads and who they want to follow. A this time one can only send a message of 140 characters.
Some new things does not make it. I remember when I first signed up with SecondLife everything was working great. Now SL has more bugs then most things with computers. Some how I see twitter is going to make it. Yes twitter has bugs, but it is new. I ask that you are wade it out for a while.
on May 20th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
The withdrawals I go through every time Twitter breaks seem a sign of what the thing has become, and I’ve only been on since December. I tried Pownce during one of the recent outages and couldn’t get into it. Aside from the fact that no one I know is on Pownce, which is a big issue, it lacks something, I don’t know what, that Twitter gets.
I’m on Twitter every day, and yet I have to admit, I still don’t quite get what makes it so addicting. But it is.
on May 21st, 2008 at 3:43 am
[…] are getting louder, but the paradox is that nobody wants to leave Twitter. Dan Gillmor’s post is a perfect example. After Dan makes a plea for someone to build a replacement for Twitter, the […]
on May 21st, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Actually, I think this shows how little it is about technology, and more about being “connected” (in the sense of knowing the right people).
I continue to be amazed at how much noise Twitter gets for being the darling of the A-listers. There’s some interesting sociology in here somewhere.
on May 22nd, 2008 at 1:48 pm
[…] seem to come from people that aren’t really looking to change services. There are calls for twitter replacements, but a quick search will find several examples already. I attended a session at Boston BarCamp3 […]
on May 25th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
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