Twitter’s Problems Continue
While Twitter has been functional for a pretty long while, for almost a week, users have been unable to reply directly to tweets. Understandably, non-functionality of this feature has caused yet more Twitter users to abandon it and move on to Friendfeed.
As Michael Arrington from TechCrunch reports, Twitter’s latest attempt at keeping its service up is to disable certain features. This way, they are able to maintain the ability of users to send and receive tweets, but at the expense of tools that compose integral parts of the service.
Arrington is dead-on when he points out that disabling replies is just about the worst move Twitter could make. Cutting out the ability to coalesce long, spontaneous conversations on Twitter is driving a lot of users, Arrington included, to the conversation feature on Friendfeed.
Basically, what Twitter is now is not much different from the status line on Facebook. One can say what they’re doing, and that’s it: end of story. It’s fine for people who use Twitter that way, which is probably a good portion of the casual users. But for hardcore Twitter users, the end is nigh.
Twitter has already expressed frustration at their biggest users, blaming them for some of the outages. Disabling reply and pretending the service is still close to what it was is just another slap in the face to those who were dedicated to Twitter and spent so much time boosting it up.
Big blunder.
Technorati Tags: twitter, friendfeed, twitter outages
