4 Factors That Are Destroying The Twitter Experience

May 29th, 2008

Ya know, I’ve been sort of hard on Twitter. Sure, we can debate about the mistakes they’ve made with their architecture and their public relations until the cows come home, but it all comes down to one thing. We all love Twitter. Unconditionally perhaps.

To be totally frank, the Twitter tech team and corporate ladder are not the people that are destroying the Twitter experience. There are plenty of external reasons for its calamity of late.

1. Twhirl and the Twitter API: Don’t misunderstand. Twhirl is an excellent application. Built on the Adobe AIR platform, it’s sleek, clean, quick, and great for use if you don’t want to drift into the public timeline. But here within is the problem. Power users who use Twhirl exclusively might be missing out on the most important factor of Twitter, the reply.

Because of the 60 API request limits per hour which the Twitter API has users abide by, it seems that Twhirl has led people to post and run, waiting for others to communicate. The problem is that nowadays, a smaller amount of people are actually latching on to the web interface, catching all of the noise that runs by. Users of Twhirl (and I’m only speaking from personal experience) might be missing out on a lot of conversation by sticking totally with the program. The API limit means you’re not refreshing as often as you might like too, and maybe not even checking your friend timeline at all.

2. FriendFeed: FriendFeed takes the linear form of Twitter and makes it non-linear by grouping personal Tweets in groups, rather than in conversational context. Users who are making the switch over to FriendFeed might be missing half of the story and not even know it. And the problem isn’t so much that FriendFeed is bad. It’s that it’s too damn good.

The FriendFeed addiction bug is just as contagious and maybe more so than the Twitter bug. I could compare FriendFeed to super glue. Very sticky, hard to ignore, and even harder to remove from your life once it’s stuck in your psyche. FriendFeed is already resulting in a decrease in noise on Twitter. It’s clear to me. But sometimes you just feel like jumping on Twitter for a linear conversation, but when you get there, you realize the real party has hopped on a different boat.

3. Spammers: Though not nearly as serious of an epidemic as a month ago or so, spammers are still prevalent on the Twitter site. It was unavoidable. A site such as Twitter which serves as a perfect outlet to communicate one message to tons of users at once was the perfect place for the spam horde to congregate.

But it’s quite unnerving to wake up in the morning to find, say, 10 new followers, more than half of which might be spam. And though there is no law restricting you to refollow spammers, there’s no telling when a user is going to break out the feed machine and start chugging out multi-post Last.Fm scrobbles or spammy blog posts.

4. The Twitter Bad-Mouth Brigade: OK, guilty as charged. I was once one of those people who logs on to Twitter, and continues to post only about what Twitter is lacking. But after a while, this mentality is a real downer. For once I would love to log into Twitter and have a conversation about something that isn’t Twitter-centric.

There was a time where Twitter was my secret hideout for talking about the newest and more interesting tech news and conventions, but Twitter is going through that classical critical mass backlash, so FriendFeed has become my new special place. It’s clear that Twitter users love talking about Twitter. And I love it just as much as the next user. But it would just be nice to go there and use it for something other than Twitter bashing or evangelizing.