Good quote from Nav:
Twitter is run by a bunch of dumb asses. Someone should buy twitter, buy summize, fire the twitter management, and let summize people run the show cause they obviously know what they are doing.
I don’t know if I feel quite that strongly, I do agree that Twitter does seem to be dropping the ball of late.
Imagine how angry you would be if you actually paid for Twitter–their service is slow or fails at least once every day or two, and yet we keep using it because they have a monopoly. They’re like a bad phone or electric company.
Someone should build a reliable Twitter clone that works exactly like Twitter AND uses the Twitter API to post all your messages to Twitter and pull in all your friends messages. You could transition without worrying about leaving your contacts behind, because the new service would have complete backwards compatibility. Then only difference would be that when Twitter went down, you wouldn’t notice, because ReliableTwitter would still work. You would slowly win your friends over by talking about how much better the new service is.
The same goes for Craiglist. Their user interface has been stagnant for years and they could seriously use a little CSS upgrade and some mapping features.
It’s quite a shame how little real innovation there is on the internet. One of the only companies I’ve seen doing anything interesting lately is disqus, a company trying to improve blog comment conversation, an area which has suffered years of stagnation.
…end rant…
3 responses so far ↓
1 CC // May 29, 2008 at 3:31 am
Speaking of Disqus, you should put them here.
Also, I’d love to hear twitter’s side of this whole fiasco, at first glance it seems like since the service is dead simple, scaling it should be too. Here is Dave Winer with a few interesting numbers: http://twitter.scripting.com/spewage.html
I’ve been summizing people’s sentiments about it and many suggest a shadowed twitter service…
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/could_an_open_source_twittersphere_save_twitter_or_kill_it_
2 iqram // May 29, 2008 at 3:19 pm
My question is, would you, as the first user of Twitter, pay for its service?
I think that is a question that needs to be asked by all internet start ups. Twitter gets the fame because they managed to grow a company with no intimal business model. Now that is a very respectable accomplishment, but they have some serious work to do in order to sustain the company. They already lost me as a user.
In regards to Craigslist:
Beauty is intimidating.
People don’t like to be intimidated. “Web 1.0″ although by minority vote, is ugly, seems to be widely accepted by the majority of internet users (take myspace for example or geocities back in the day). Craigslist has something that works. I’ve even heard it being referred to as the best dating website (also think plentyoffish). I think Craigslist will change it’s interface and add more useful features once gradient backgrounds become more commonly “accepted” and understood.
Beauty is intimidating. After all, how many hot women are you afraid to approach.
3 kortina // May 29, 2008 at 3:44 pm
@cc - I’ll add disqus when the server side beta is stable.
@iqram - I don’t want Craigslist to be more beautiful, I want it to be more useful. Try searching for an apartment in Brooklyn, for example. Better geographical information and map views would be a vast improvement.
ps. I hate gradient backgrounds–they should stay in photoshop and off the web.
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