Crenk

If you’ve used Twitter in the past couple of weeks, you’ve encountered something a bit amiss: you can’t use it. Yes, that’s right…Twitter has been down. More than usual too. The loss of our beloved web application has resulted in the masses at a loss for what they should do now to let their friends and network know what’s going on with their lives. I suppose you could rely on Facebook to update your status, but that seems so limited. You could update your blog, but that’s just so tedious and pointless to have a 140 character status update on a post.

But wait! FriendFeed to the rescue! Yes, FriendFeed is slowly dipping into the market share of Twitter without having to do any work. Why is Twitter easily giving up their users to a new application? In an article on CNET.com, the heads of Twitter put it simply as:

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not designed as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system…

So basically since your success from 2007’s South by Southwest, you never thought that you could amass such a following of users? And now, seeing that everyone from the Average Joe to mainstream media is using your service, you’re now thinking strategically and then going back to reinvent the wheel? That’s bad…and has definitely caught the ire of TechCrunch’s own Mike Arrington, Dave Winer, and hundreds of other users.

Twitter is obviously responding to these charges and annoyances, but the more that it results in outages, the greater the impact it’ll have on the number of users abandoning their platform and seeking satisfaction elsewhere, perhaps on Seesmic, Utterz, Pownce, or even FriendFeed.

I’m sure that Twitter will be back up and running, but this is something that most of us can expect to happen with any successful application that hits it big and secures major financing. In addition, there’s discussions in the web realm about Twitter perhaps charging for their fees. Is this legit? Who really knows. There are plenty of blogs and videos about the text-messaging/SMS service ultimately delivering status updates for a small cost, but would I pay right now? Probably not…if it results in me paying just to have it work, then no, but if it’s stable 99.99% of the time and has a high ROI and value, then perhaps.

But until then, let’s just hope that there won’t be something “technically” wrong…make it work FIRST, then let’s talk about what we’re willing to put up with.

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