Solo Technology

A month ago I was pondering social bankruptcy, but since then I really hadn’t made any changes–until today. The recent and frequent twitter outages have inspired me to give that service up cold turkey.

Outages = aggravation. Who needs aggravation? Not me.

I’ve seen a lot of folks excuse or apologize for the twitter outages by trotting out the “well, it is free” argument. Frankly, I call bunk on that. But, I’ll spare you my longwinded and rambling thoughts. Instead,just go read Free Doesn’t Mean Fail over at Webreakstuff. I think Fred sums it up quite nicely. For instance, here’s a key portion:

Just because it’s free, it doesn’t mean it has no value

Let me put it this way. Gmail is free and yet I’d personally panic if it suddenly went away. Google is free too, and we use it all the time. Free doesn’t mean “allowed to suck”, or stand for “acceptable downtime”. Free products like Gmail, Google, Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed still have a value. What you’re not giving away in dollars (or in our case here, Euros), you’re giving away in data and attention.

I’m probably still hanging with FriendFeed (I’m there) and would love to catch up with more folks there while avoiding the need to create imaginary friends. If we follow each other on Twitter, would you consider doing a quick FriendFeed account too?

I may also dabble with Pownce a bit, but it was pretty sluggish earlier today so I fear the aggravation factor there as well… After all, I’m trying to simplify not transfer angst

Ironically, announcing this blog post may be my last twitter tweet.

7 Responses to “Sorry Twitter But It’s You, Not Me.”

1. Rich Griffith on May 21st, 2008 7:04 am
   

   The twitter thing that most makes me crazy isn’t outages. Honestly, I hadn’t noticed any because my whole internet was borked lately. But the thing that bugs me most about twitter is a page of tweets all starting with @somebody You’re right! or @boogers Thank you! Seriously, a page or two of two twitter monkeys catching up on 200 tweets that don’t apply to me, I’d like to be able to filter out the @not_Me’s.
   As it is I almost never read twitter, but only feed it… which has had me thinking why am I here again? lol
   Guild on EQ? What’s the name? Which guild did you go to? EQ1 or 2? I’m still addicted to WoW. It didn’t take the first two times, but this most recent time I jones for it if I can’t get my fix. Weird hunh?

2. Chris on May 21st, 2008 7:13 am
   

   Yeah, if a user was only doing @replies I wouldn’t bother to follow them. I’m not interested in [solely] watching half conversations.

   As for the guild… You might have heard of them: Fizzle Fiends in EQ1. I fell into being GL (3rd times a charm?) yet again.

3. Denice on May 21st, 2008 9:08 am
   

   So, Tiff made me join twitter and it pulled my contacts in from gmail and there you were. So, if you give it up, you’re the only person I know who updates it regularly. I am not even sure I see the value in the thing, but Tiff likes it, the things you do for your friends.

4. Chris on May 21st, 2008 9:47 am
   

   @denice oh geeze, I didn’t know you and Tiff were on Twitter. Well, for that matter, I didn’t know you were a blogger too How cool.

   Um, join up with Friendfeed?

5. Rich Griffith on May 21st, 2008 10:36 am
   

   the fiends are still around? Holy crap!

   As guild founder I’m shocked lol. Wonder how many ppl would even remember my characters if he logged on. Wow that was a long time ago.

6. Alisha on May 21st, 2008 1:57 pm
   

   Hi Chris, I’m so sad you’ll be leaving Twitter! I don’t have any plans on using FriendFeed. Twitter and Pownce are the only two for me - I’m lucky I can even keep up with them.

   But, I’ll still read your blog! So, just don’t stop blogging!

7. » pingback » OK Twitter, Maybe it WAS Me Too… » Solo Technology on May 22nd, 2008 10:06 pm
   
   

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