I’ve been trying to convince friends to use Twitter. Yada yada, it’s a service that you allows you to provide simple updates on what you’re doing. It can actually become very addictive. Tess Dixon has written about it many times, here and here.
Right now though, it’s frustrating. Twitter was down yesterday for at least an hour, around 2 PM. So what’s the deal? This is the 3rd time I’ve seen an outage in the past month. If they want this service to grow to the Nth degree to other planets like Microsoft Mars, shouldn’t they make sure they are UP AND RUNNING? I thought maybe the $5.5 million dollars in additional funding they got last month would prevent the outages. Nope.
So here’s the deal. We should all start thinking about Jaiku. It’s basically the same thing as Twitter, yet they were acquired by Google in late 2007. Here is a little Q&A page about the acquisition. There is a lot of optimism from Google. Best part is, you know it will be ALWAYS UP if Google supports it. PLUS… and this is where it gets really cool… Google has announced OpenSocial, which will be a way to centralize your social network so you don’t have to rebuild when you switch to a new service. Amazing. I love technology this year!
So, the verdict… I’m going to stick with Twitter until Jaiku is ready to roll.
Tags: Google, jaiku, opensocial, tess dixon, twitter
Yeah, Twitter has been down a lot lately, and it sucks. I’m not quite ready to bounce over to Jaiku or Pownce just yet. Twitter is better in my opinion, if the service was reliable of course.
You mention the 5 million they recently closed in funding. Hopefully in time this will help their problem. Throwing money at the problem doesn’t really help, especially when we consider that they have a system running in production. It takes time to get new people in house, get them up to speed, and figure out how to redesign Twitter. I think it’s a big deal to essentially rebuild the whole product. And now they have a huge dependency of all the data currently stored. There really are a lot of problems they have to tackle and they’re not trivial.
Definitely hoping the service gets better because I do love me some Twitter.
It looks like Jaiku is a lot like friend feed - aggregating your information from multiple channels. I have a friend feed account, but dont really use it. I have a pownce account, but hate it. I really want Twitter to work. One of the biggest things right now would to be at least notify people ‘yes we are actually down right now and we are working on it’
I do love Google, and one of my mantras in life is to consolidate information in ONE PLACE whenever possible. Leave it to Google to take care of this for me (I hope). I will say though that sometimes Google things are down. Gchat definitely has its service slumps, and for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon my Gcal wasn’t working. And there was that one time, that one horrible time, when Google let me down. They cleared all the Sticky Notes in my Google Homepage, so that all the lists I was keeping were completely wiped out, never to return. But for all the days they didn’t let me down, I am thankful.
Please explain to your friend what a “mantra” is.
Meh, from a social standpoint, I dunno if I wanna know what my friends are doing at every moment. I’m shying away from even updating my status on facebook - obviously it’s all about how much personal privacy you want to maintain (which is opposite of belonging to a social network like twitter or FB…ya im bein a hermit i guess