Alex's SNWeblog

Twitter is broken, unstable, slow and is getting competition..

Ever since they had that major downtime in May I think, IM has been down, and ever since that day its there number one priority to get it back up. So why did the ‘track’ feature come back first then? and why did it go down again? I feel sorry for them, every fix they make makes Twitter more unstable, they often have to rollback code ‘fixes’ etc. the API is broken. There’s no API management, so if you use FF, twhirl or Socialthing etc it will count toward the API limit, now brought back to 20  connections an hour, the only way to manage it when you loose them all, is to change your password and change it on the services you want to update from your Twitter.

The replies tab goes down quiet often, Twitter is useless without the replies tab. You might as well take down twitter all together if that doesnt work. Pagination is the same, I often can’t scroll back and the limit is now set on 10 pages back, and no you can’t change the url it will bring you back to the index page. I am not going to keep checking twitter for timeline updates, if I can’t go back forget it. I’ll just go somewhere else, but where?

This is going to be a problem for Twitter, there are allot of alternatives, but the one that’s caught on the most is Plurk! Plurk is weird the first time you use it but it grows on to you, the time line is horizontal, and you can reply on Plurks in a thread. This is something I really like, and so do allot of people, not more @-ing (you can still do that btw) but replying in a thread, likes it’s a blog post, it’s more like a microblog instead of a messaging service. So while twitter is having problems, more and more people are moving over to Plurk and more and more people are discovering the joy of threaded Replies. So even when Twitter comes back, people won’t return they will miss the threaded replies. Really all Plurk needs is IM and an API. It will get some getting used to though.

So some will say, what the deal: Jaiku has done this forever. That is correct, but in my mind Jaiku is dead. It got sold to Google and they’ve closed Jaiku to invite only. Jaiku has threaded replies, but it also has a feature so you can import your lifeline, your RSS feeds. I don’t like that, It’s too much noise. Sure plugging your blogpost is ok, but I don’t need to know that youve just uploaded 30 million photos, with a Jaiku for every photo. Just manual post ONE Jaiku for every photo Batch you uploaded.

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Always wanted to search google in a commandline textonly style? Then Goosh.org might be something for you. It’s add free googling, really clean and straight forward, Just take a look:

just press H for a list of commands or start your search straighway by typing something and pressing enter.
I searched for ‘Buzz Out Loud’ and the results are clean:

Go and have some fun and try Goosh.org

Yes you read it right, I hate embed codes! Why, you ask? Because 99% of them aren’t XHTML Compliant. Since my blog redesign Rosana Made sure it would be XHTML and CSS Compliant (yeah the buttons on the bottom of the page actually mean something now) click them and see what it says:

So now it’s my job to keep it that way, Rosana gave me some tips on doing that. So whats the problem? Well if I want to insert for ex. a CNETTV video my Blog ain’t compliant anymore and that sucks, same with Flickr if I say to Flickr, ‘post this image on my blog’ it will post something that isn’t compliant. Why can’t big companies just make sure that everything is web standards compliant? Is it so hard to make a webstandards compliant embed? or for that matter a webstandards compliant browser?

We all know how unstable Twitter has been the last few weeks, or has always been. So is it time for something new? Lets put it this way, there’s finally a real Twitter competitor, with the time line and the @ replies and the 140 character limit. It’s Called Plurk! Leo Laporte just sent out an invite to everybody following him on twitter.
So as a web 2.0 junkie I saw it as my task to sign up.

So whats it all about, it’s really allot like twitter, a bit more flashy with ajax stuff etc, It doesn’t look that simple. Just take a look at this picture:

It looks really pretty, but I can’t take a quick glance at it an know what my friends are doing. I like the list on twitter allot more.

Anyway I suggest you try it, and take a look for your self. If you want to add me I’m ‘Tales‘ on Plurk.

And click here if you want to get an invite.
Update: Seems alot of people are giving it a try, who knows maybe it really will be the twitter replacement

Update 2: Plurk seems to be dying already, If you try to upload a picture to your profile: ‘ Due to server move picture uploading is currently disabled.
It will be re-enabled during tomorrow – monday.’