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Update 8-6-09: The Twitterverse is a flutter with the most recent Tweetless moment. Mashable has this to say: Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)

It was almost as if this were real news: Twitter's down, Twitter's down, the sky is falling, the internet is dark, how will we TWEEEEET?

So, seriously? Did it interrupt any of your business? Well, it made it a little harder to publicize my posts (It was a 3 post day, so far!) and that's tough! And… wait a minute, maybe Facebook was behind the attacks, trying to put it's problem stepchild down! Or, maybe not.

I'm just sayin, if Twitter being down is amazing, imagine what's gonna happen when it really goes down. DDoS, WMD, Google Wave… Something is heading towards Biz and Co. and we don't even know what it is yet. It's probably not North Korea, but it's gonna take the-network-that-failed-on-a-daily-basis out. Done. Here's a post I wrote about this idea back when WAVE was announced.

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So I'm not trying to freak you out or anything. But Twitter's failure cannot fail to be overlooked any longer. If Google TWAVE doesn't suck in twitter's entire organization then perhaps Google too is shortsighted. But Twitter as a company, as a platform is DEAD. Let me explain.

Twitter keeps complaining about coming up with their revenue stream, revenue model. In the 1.5 years that I have been actively working with/on twitter for DELL and now as an independant consultant, Twitter has done nothing to engage in the conversation. I mean really engage. I agree they have had Live Meetings and Chats, townhall style. And I agree they have hired some folks (thank goodness) to WORK on Twitter. But they keep doing dumb stuff.

Like changing the @(direct messaging) protocol so that you no longer saw people's @tweets unless you knew BOTH people. So now everyone, that understands the value of discovery via Twitter is forced to do things like add a character "before" the "@" so that the change will have no effect. [Example: !@EV the NEW TWEAK to direct messaging in Twitter is Wrong and Stupid.] I am surprised that Tweetdeck has not made "add ! to my @ everytime I reply to someone" as a preference.

Or somehow letting Britney Fxxxxxd Vids as a user name propigate on Twitter like termites. I delete at least 10 of these accounts off my "followers" list on a daily basis.

Having some arcane rule about how many peeps you follow vs how many are following you. It's like a black box. Some days I hit my "YOU CANNOT FOLLOW ANY MORE PEOPLE" limit. Most days I don't. But I can't figure out what Twitter is doing to give me information about how to manage this situation. When it arises I am usually in the middle of business as usual and I find someone interesting to follow, I look at their profile and PING, YOU CANNOT FOLLOW ANY MORE PEOPLE.

There have been discussions that there is some ratio they like to see, like no more than 1.1 x your number of followers, after you reach the magical and deadly 2,000. But I have had my ratio upside down by more than 1,000 tweeps (meaning 1,000 more followers than people I'm following) and still hit the TWITTERJAIL LIMIT ISSUE. So what's up with that?

If TWITTER were a cloud solution that were critical to my business, which it isn't, I would change clouds. And fast. I can't even get a straight answer about it from Twitter.

GOOD START: If THERE IS A RULE, PUBLISH IT.

BETTER SOLUTION: If I'm a trusted tweeter (not sure how they could establish this – but they sure Whitehat folks) don't slap this stupid limit on me. If I abuse the previously mentioned and now published RULE, then Limit me.

Fix your user interface for follow and unfollow. I have to page (20 peeps at a time) to follow or unfollow people. So if I have 4,000 followers that's how many pages…? I'm bad at math. But what I know is, it is a pain to MANAGE my twitter account in any way. If the FAIL WHALE doesn't arrive then I am merely slogging through page load after page load of tweeps. How about giving me a "VIEW 100 Tweeps at a Time"? That might work. Give me a better interface to manage my followers and friends.

And if you don't think that Google is about to put Twitter in the sleeper hold, check out this timely missive from ZDNet.

So let's see. 90% of Twitter's server traffic is servicing the API calls.

Because, no one wants to spend any more time on the Twitter site then they have to… And we all have to if we want to manage our followers.

• Twitter needs to figure out how to make money, cause servers and bandwidth are expensive.
• Executweets is about as interesting as AOL.
• "Verified" accounts are important if your REAL NAME is Donald Trump.

Otherwise, it's just another form of communication. Like IM with a subscription scheme. And that won't be hard to replace when the time comes. Not hard at all. In fact, I'd like to propose we start writing the TwitterSucker API now to migrate all the twitter account info into our NEW GEARS ENABLED TWITTER CLOUD.

Until then… "Dang! It is still down!" is just not a very interesting rally cry.

So my Tweetdeck is showing

but my deck looks like this

That's a lot of NOT SO GOOD STATUS.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/twitter-is-dead

Additional Info:

• ZDNET: Google's micro-blogging search engine
• Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)
• Twitter Outage Explained: What’s a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)?
• Denial of Service Attacks Being Investigated by Google, Twitter, Facebook
• ALERT: 1000s of Twitter Accounts Compromised in Latest Spam Attack

Tags: bad twitter habits, DDoS, don't panic, sniping on twitter, twitter, twitter attacked, twitter business model, twitter design, twitter is dead, twitter is down, twitter scam, twitter status, twitter sux, twitter user experience, twitterfail, working twitter