Twitter continues to be unreliable..

..one has to ask, what the hell are they doing? Was their software platform really SO flakey to start with that they are having this many problems ongoing? They only have a couple hundred thousand users – and I bet they are not all active(!). The answer is yes it probably was that flakey.

For those who don’t know, Twitter is a microblogging service – a way to distribute and share very short chunks of text (although some video micro-blogging services have started up) with friends or strangers. I question its important; many say its the unimportance of the service which is its strength. It has slowly gathered some pace after copious and unwavering support from the West Coast tech and social media community; in my opinion unreasonably so, and completely out of proportion to its accomplishments, especially alongside services like Jaiku (recently bought by Google) who started first and offered a far better service. They were hampered by being in Europe. We simply dont support our “own” as well as the Americans support their “own”; let alone champion them.

One of my biggest personal failings, I believe, is not to have grasped the concept of building something ugly, rough and ready (from the point of view of coding, back-end infrastructure, scalability and stability) in the Web 2.0+ world. Rummble was built properly from the beginning; I’m hoping one day soon I can sit smug in the knowledge that this turned out to be the wise tortoise-raced-the-hare decision. I guess we’ll see…