A Collection Of Twit-Out Responses

The idea of Twit-Out has sprung up some very interesting conversation both on FriendFeed and the comments of the Twit-Out post. And I couldn’t be happier. This is what Twitter allows us to do, and I love it for its allowance of free expression. Keep up with the conversation on my FriendFeed to monitor the debate.

As well as the conversation over at Sean Reiser’s blog.

Here is an overview of the points made so far:

My argument was that Twitter should be doing more THEMSELVES for the community at those times when the server is down. It should be something they’re doing, not something we have to figure out. Twit-Out is a way to send that message.

It’s not about hurting Twitter at all. If the goal was to hurt them, it would be totally reversed spite, since I LOVE Twitter. All it’s about is sending a community message to Twitter that something should be done for those situations, in respect to the community. At the very least, there should be a “We’re working on the problem” type page, rather than just a purely dead server. It’s also a matter of treating the community with some respect

It’s just a matter of Twitter taking the time to listen to the community or ignoring it.

I’d love to see Twitter do it by themselves though is the point. I think if nothing is changed after Twit-Out, which probably won’t happen because of the small percentage of users who will actually not Tweet, then maybe forming an Emergency Twitter Network-like project could be worth it. But I’d really love to see Twitter do it on their own.

My main point is that these server fixes shouldn’t be maintained on the main Twitter site, effecting the whole community. There must be a way to test these changes before utilizing. It seems like they jump the shark.

Originally this project, for me at least, was a project based on frustration. It has now evolved into a brilliant conversation, which has both taught me and challenged me.

Twit-Out is not meant as a “solution”, because there is not one event that will change the stability of an entire service. Especially one that isn’t directly tied to the service at all. If Twitter was still in its beta beginnings, this sort of stability would be understandable. But they have been given quite a lot of time to make sure their service is stable. Is there any excuse to be down so often? If they were testing these new parameters on a test server, you’d figure that these cache issues would be caught, and a solution figured out.

Now, it might just be the condition of such a service that means that there will be some major cache issues along the way. But why tweak things so often that need to encounter a cache reset. And then no warning? Not even a “Sorry, we’re working on it” type page? No. It’s just dead. Is that anyway to treat a cult community?

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