Twitter – The Good and the Bad
May 31, 2008
As I’ve mentioned in the past (I think), I’m becoming quite a big fan of Twitter. For those unlucky few who don’t know what Twitter is, it’s basically a social networking site developed to allow its users to update with 140-character-or-less statuses as to what they’re doing or thinking about or something like that. It’s not exactly the most productive site on the Internet, but it is a lot of fun and is good for both networking and just general communication. Lots of people are getting interest in it, and it’s getting a lot of publicity lately. That’s the good. It’s a genius idea and a wonderful service, and I love to use it to communicate with people.
Unfortunately, though, this great service comes with a downside. It’s growing way too fast. Most of the press Twitter has gotten lately has been bad press. I’d link to some of the posts on Twitter’s blog about the downtime, but that’s unnecessary. A simple Google search will pop up tons and tons of results. In fact, they’ve even created a new blog simply for the purpose of getting the word out about their progress in fighting the problems of scalability and overloaded servers.
One other problem I’ve been having lately is with spammers. I’m not sure if there’s a name for a Twitter spammer, but there sure are lots of them. The generally-accepted method of spamming through Twitter is to obnoxiously follow tens of thousands of users (following being the method of seeing what other people post), hoping in return for many of them to return the gesture. Instant popularity. The problem is, it sorta works really well. I’ve even come across a bot titled “AutoFriendAdder” in the last few days. Of course, I quickly blocked the bot, but it proves that this is no secret.
Despite all of this, though, I’m still largely a fan of Twitter and its services. Oh, and if you haven’t signed up, you really should. Once you do that, go to my Twitter page and follow me. I’ll probably go and send a tweet saying that I wrote this post, now, actually…
Category On the Web | Tweet This Post
Leave a Reply