UPDATE: Twitter claims they stayed up. That’s what he said.
I have mixed feelings about Twitter’s announcement about how they planned to handle all the traffic and tweets coming from Steve Job’s keynote address (an iPhone 3G news) at the WWDC today.
On the one hand, Twitter seemed pro-actively trying to address problems before they happened.
On the other hand, well, there’s a bunch of other hands.
1. The reduction in features in order to support the traffic.
2. The limitations placed on APIs. Twitter recommended reducing applications such as Twhirl to 6 minutes, but who wants to wait 6 minutes for updates from Jobs’ speech (which we, of course, at the time didn’t realize how underwhelming it was going to be).
3. Twitter still went down.
I had planned for Twitter to go down, but I was hoping that their fixes would work. When Twhirl stopped updating for me, I tried to use IM updates via Google Talk. But IM updates were down.
So eventually I remembered this fun little site called FriendFeed. FriendFeed is still mixed for me. It has a great platform for conversations in place, but I still feel a bit disconnected on it.
However, I think FriendFeed (which has ex-Googlers on its team btw) is slowly building a fantastic application. I love slow yet solid growth. Twitter is the opposite.
My faith in Twitter is dwindling and I can’t believe it came to this. I mean, I’ve been a Twitter evangelist and some really cool things have happened as a result of Twitter.
But FriendFeed looks poised to take the cake. Did I mention FriendFeed AUTO-refreshes?
BY THE WAY: Yet another reminder to stop following those pesky A-listers: So many headlines and blog posts teased that Twitter had fixed itself. But when you go to the actual Twitter blog, they warned that certain features could/would go down.
I say down with the A-listers!