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I’m Boycotting Twitter Until They Get Their Act Together

May 15th, 2008

So Twitter continues to go down, again today. It’s getting to the point where you can count on it happening at least once a week.

Some folks over on FriendFeed are talking about a “Twit-Out” boycott of the Twitter service next week Wednesday. Feel free to participate if these outages annoy you.

I’m going one further – I’m not using Twitter again, until they improve the uptime of their service (if ever). It’s too sporadic to be reliable. I’ll use FriendFeed exclusively until (if ever) Twitter get their act together and make stability a priortiy.

That might sound harsh, but I’m not in a sympathetic mood. I don’t care if scaling is hard. I don’t care if they’re surely trying to figure it all out. All that matters: is Twitter up when I want to use it? The answer is increasingly no, and I don’t want to patronize compaines that can’t even provide the bare minimum of service they claim to.

In this case, Twitter’s loss is FriendFeed’s gain. I’ve already written how FriendFeed has largely replaced Google Reader in my world. It looks like Twitter will be replaced as well, through their own incompetence.

Louis Gray recently wrote a few words that apply well here: “In this fast-moving industry, if you’re not fast-moving, you might as well quit.”

Having a great idea is only a small part of the startup success story. Much more important is execution, and that includes moving faster than the competition. Here, Twitter is getting a gigantic FAIL. They should be moving quickly to solve these outage problems and through PR, address the negative reputation they’re gaining as an unreliable service. Despite their great idea, the competition (FriendFeed, Pownce, Jaiku) is ready and waiting to snatch away disgruntled users.

I know one person has little effect in the larger scheme of whether Twitter survives as a company but this is my small vote saying I don’t need them as much as they need us users. I am an unhappy user. I can’t rely on their service and I don’t think it’s right to just wait patiently by for them to get their crap together. I’m outta there.

Twitter boycott begins today; see you all on FriendFeed.

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  • Wow, you're very serious about Twit-Out boycott! Well, I am very glad to see you over on Friendfeed! http://friendfeed.com/susanbeebe
  • Nice to see you smbeebe. FriendFeed o rama!
  • Friendfeed FTW! w00t!
  • i don't think i'll be following this action, as there are numerous services which i have tied together via the whole twitter exchange, but i would like to see serious action on anyone's part to distribute the twitter service so that it is not contingent upon official Twitter servers to operate.
  • Totally agree. And if that distributed solution comes from Twitter
    themselves, more power to 'em.
  • Good luck to you man, I hope they fix the issues soon. I don't have the balls to leave Twitter for good.
  • Thanks - i'll mention the one day twitter boycott too. But a big reason why I'm okay with leaving Twitter temporarily is because I have FriendFeed - my cojones are not that big.
  • I probably won't follow your all-out boycott either. I am planning to blog about next week's Twit-Out thing by Sunday, depending on when I get a chance to blog. Since I use twhirl at home and HelloTxt when I'm away, Twitter outages just mean a few updates get lost on Twitter but show up on Pownce and Jaiku. Since FriendFeed pulls all three services into my feed, nothing is lost unless all three of them are down (which has never happened yet).
  • Have fun! Twitter will probably be a better place without you :)
  • Heh. And your earth shatterinly wonderful tweets aren't a big draw for me to
    stay :)
  • Perhaps I have a hidden motive ;)
  • I'm getting pretty frustrated with the outages too -- hope they get their scaling issues under control one of these days
  • I also hope they can figure it out. It would really be sad if they "snatched victory from the jaws of defeat" in that their service can't technically support the increasing number of folks that want to use it.
  • Mike
    Build it yourself:

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/asideshop

    I'm still working out a way to update via SMS, but it looks like it'll be a WP plugin that grabs items from RSS and inserts them into WP. Then, I'll just use a Twitter account for the SMS updates (which are infrequent, luckily). :)
  • jna
    You leaving twitter and getting others to leave twitter will make twitter look better and appear to function faster.

    It'll be less load on the servers and less for everyone else to deal with. Nice going!
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