Solo Technology

I resisted the Twitter thing until just last month, but since then I’ve become pretty gung-ho about the whole scene. It can be a nice distraction — but unlike IM, I like to think of it as a “queuing distraction.”  I can close the window and not miss anything.

I have two main beefs that if I can’t figure out might just chase me away.

My clients are always “limit exceeded” and paused

I turn on my machine in the morning. I start up twhirl and … I get the dreaded message indicating that I’ve exceeded the limits and my client is paused (the twhirl blog gives a nice explanation of that, btw).

WTF? I’ve been offline for 6 or 7 hours!  How can this be happening several times a day? In fact, while writing this post I started twhirl. 10 minutes later it was paused again. Maddening.

I thought maybe it was a client thing, but I have the same issue with twitux on the Linux machines as well. And Snitter? Hell, sometimes it seems to be running about 24 hours behind the real world for me… I gave up on that one for now.

I do run a WordPress plugin that probably uses the same API, but after looking over the code I’m pretty sure it only checks once every 30 minutes. Surely that’s not putting me over the edge. Dunno, maybe I should disable it for a day and see if anything improves.

I don’t see other people whining about this so I’m assuming it is somehow specific to me…

I can’t trust the web interface

The other day I was idly clicking through to the folks I follow and realized that when watching my page on twitter (http://twitter.com/home) I only see about half of what they post!

That is damned annoying. And yes, I’m dutifully/manually hitting refresh every few minutes.

For instance, check these two pictures out. First from my twitter page:

That covers the past two hours. Not much going on really. But then I clicked over to Scott Hanselman’s page (just by clicking his name) and see a post that I didn’t get during that same time span.

(sorry Scott, I’m not really a stalker. Honest!)

His tweet about Oregon 34 minutes ago never showed up on my page. Scrolling down, several others from yesterday never showed up either. I can illustrate similar issues with most of the other folks I follow as well.

Seems like this was reported as being fixed yesterday (assuming I interpreted this support topic correctly) but I’m definitely still seeing it today.

Pownce?

I’ve pondered switching to Pownce which just came out of beta a few weeks ago, but… well hell, it seems the majority of “interesting” folks to follow are on Twitter.  Trying to be active on both Pownce and Twitter is a bit too social for my tastes.

And that’s the kicker ain’t it? Something like this dies or lives based on who’s using it.

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