Unintelligentsia

Twatter

Twitter is supposed to be a micro blog for people who are too lazy to write a story or construct an opinion other than a one line sentence about what they had for breakfast or the shit they just took. I understand that it could be relevant in certain situations like a fan following his favorite athletes daily routine, or a celebrity staying in touch with their fans, but this doesn’t stop me from thinking that Twitter will last about one more year before it goes under.

The problems facing any site on the internet, and especially “social networking” sites, are two fold. First, there is the issue of technical maintainability, which is my term for, shit easy enough and safe enough for someone with Alzheimer’s to use. MySpace initially was the best at this, allowing a easy to use personal site which was essentially a free-for-all for users to post whatever the fuck they wanted. But it proved to be a security nightmare, so people moved over to Facebook, which is now increasingly bending under the strain of it’s millions of users (twitter is struggling with this too). And this strain is a technical maintainability issue that they will have to address for Facebook to continue to be relevant. Why the fuck would I go to Facebook if it takes an hour to pull up my profile page? Or if there was a chance my account could be hacked by Russians? The answer is, I fucking wouldn’t.

I just sent this letter to Twitter this morning:

So, I keep changing my password via the website and I still cannot seem to login. And now your captcha system keeps coming up with words I can’t read so it might even be that preventing me from logging in, PLUS, this is on top of the other issue I have where I cannot change my profile picture

I know you guys have millions of users, some of whom are far more important than I, but christ, it seems like of all the technical intricacies behind your site, logging in and profile pictures would be the two easiest to solve, especially for a company/idea that is concerned about being a passing fad. Anywho, when you get the chance if you could make your site not suck that would be rad.

If this crap persists, I will simply delete my account. Fuck them. How many engineers does it take to fix a profile picture uploading problem? Idiots.

Problem number two is about content creation, or in more simplistic terms, stacking that motherfucking cheese. People come to your site to read, view, or interact, with something, anything, and that’s the rub, how do you get people to generate content people want to view? On my website, I write shit, and maybe 10 people read it, and only 10 people read it because ultimately, no one wants to read what I write. The same goes for Twitter, I’m mildly interested in what Lance Armstrong does on a day to day basis, but damn, not that interested. After the fifteenth post about how far he rode that day, I am going to stop checking.

People don’t even pick up newspapers anymore, so why is Twitter any different? It isn’t. Once the novelty and ego centric addictions to posting wear thin, especially when the service is ham stringed by niggling technical woes, the idea will fade into obscurity faster than a white Michael Jackson.

So why am I dedicating my first post in months to a service I believe to be irrelevant? Because I am bored out of my mind at work and have spent the entire morning trying to change my Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace profile pictures. It’s sad, but true.