I Hate Twitter
Posted on November 24, 2008
Filed Under digital-lifestlye | 5 Comments
I went for a long time resisting Twitter, then I joined and liked it for a good while. Eventually I grew weary about Twitter’s downtime and disingenuity and their rolling back of the feature set. Meanwhile, I liked FriendFeed from the first time I used it and the value of it has consistently gone up to me. At this point, I love FriendFeed and hate Twitter. In the course of two years, I have gone with Twitter from brand apathy to brand loyalty to brand contempt.
Now comes the news that Twitter has acquired Values of N - the company that built I Want Sandy – and will be shutting down their services on December 8th. I used Sandy and l liked it a lot. In fact, the main reason I stopped using it on a daily basis and started using Google Calendar and documents for that kind of work is when Twitter took IM access away. I’m highly pissed about this. It makes no sense to me why even if Twitter acquired Value of N they can’t leave the services up and running with a skeleton crew. This just reinforces the idea that you should be careful what services you commit your time and energy to, because Web 2.0 companies will screw you and make you waste your time building value that they cash out and leave you holding the bag.
I now loathe Twitter as a company and a service. I wish them the worst and hope they disappear, sooner rather than later. I’m happy that my Twitter network has pretty much migrated over to FriendFeed. I have the Twitter integration turned on but would gladly switch it off in a heartbeat. I don’t originate tweets there, FriendFeed is the central location for me. Nothing about Twitter makes me happy anymore. Not the service, not the company and not the way they do business.
Update: I kept building a slow burn on this until I decided I’m done. I had been pushing my FriendFeed updates to Twitter since they added that functionality but now I’m turning it off. I don’t want to do anything to that builds value for Twitter. I’m withdrawing my participation from them.
Update 2: Mark at Mashable has picked up on this post. Even though my goal is to “love loud and hate quiet”, it’s always the hating that gets any traction. Love isn’t as good a story. It should be noted that the only thing I’ve used Twitter for in the last 24 hours was to ask Twitter users to join FriendFeed – successfully at that. That’s the only thing Twitter is good for to me anymore.
Update 3: The people who are pushing back to my stance have only one shaky leg to stand on, and I address that in a new post – Free Services are Not Free.
Update 4: The term I should have injected into this debate earlier is “stewardship.” I Want Sandy asked to handle information that was important to us, and asked for our trust. By getting acquired and shutting down the service, they have betrayed themselves as poor stewards of that trust.
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5 Responses to “I Hate Twitter”
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 11 people and commented on 21 times hide-
Serves me right for signing up for I Want Sandy tonight. Very, very promising service. Twitter must reconsider this decision.
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In protest, I'm done with Twitter.
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Damn. I gotta think about this. I think you're right, Dave.
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Shutting down push to Twitter now.
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And despite having slept on it and theoretically having cooled down, I'm more mad today than yesterday.
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This is also why, despite people looking at me strangely, I often choose the paid-for option or the self-hosted option over the free service-based one when it comes to online services. I'd rather pay my way than have the rug pulled out from underneath.
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It definitely is the hidden cost of free. I still don't understand what cost is so burdensome that you can't leave the server turned on, stop development on the product and have a minimal part time admin doing DB backups periodically. For that matter, sell off Sandy to someone else.
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I haven't checked into the details of this sale yet, but did they also buy Stikkit.com, which was the API under much of Sandy?
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"Values of n will be shutting down existing products. However, the technology behind the scenes will live on and potentially re-emerge as part of Twitter's systems, services, user experience, or open source libraries." http://blog.twitter.com/2008/11/meet-rael-dornfest.html
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Basically, they bought the guy out just to get him on board. Personally, I'd prefer to monetize my own products and keep working for myself rather than jump on a drowning whale. Or at least take employment with Twitter and keep Values of N as his own. They must've offered a helluva signing bonus. Which explains that grin in the link.
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Folks finally jumping off Twitter, http://identi.ca would welcome you ;-)
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Matthew, when FriendFeed adds the push to identica and reply to identi.ca with a checkbox feature parity with their Twitter integration, I'll use it.
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Yeah, I signed up but I'm not hooking it up to Twitter.
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Dave, I'm with you. Friendfeed, can we see the identi.ca option added? That would be a major plus.
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They should also just go ahead and show all 49 services when someone goes to add services to their profile. Most identi.ca people don't realize they can even add their identi.ca feeds to their profile anyway, because it doesn't show up in that initial list of services. Why not show them all up front?
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ditto the call to add identica posting and twitter parity. I would actually qualify the call by asking for laconica parity similar to twitter services. Leo LaPorte should weigh in...since he runs a laconica server.
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I'm trying to originate all my weather postings on Identica with the Twitter bridge. Have struggled to make that leap in my personal network, though. I find I still have to use Twitter for responses because if I start replying on Identica and those bridge over, people with different usernames cause a nice little snafu. :-\
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That's been my problem too.
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It should be pointed out that even if Twitter changed their mind and decided to keep I Want Sandy and Stickitt alive, it is too late. Their contempt for the value created in Web 2.0 is apparent and correcting this bad decision doesn't make things better. Stop them before they shut down more!
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Mashable linked to my biscuit-headed take: http://mashable.com/2008/11/25/values-of-n/
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Just added a new update to the post with this bit: "The term I should have injected into this debate earlier is "stewardship." I Want Sandy asked to handle information that was important to us, and asked for our trust. By getting acquired and shutting down the service, they have betrayed themselves as poor stewards of that trust."
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Gee, thanks Dave. I had no idea about Sandy. Now I check it out and it looks so good and useful, I think I’d like to….oh, never mind.
I wish FF had a feature where it would look at your twitter and automatically add those who you are following that don’t have friendfeed to your imaginary friends, than send them all a private tweet saying, you really should join friend feed.
Hip, hip, horray for Dave! One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind kinda news. The sooner The Fail Whale sinks belly up to the bottom of the ocean, the sooner mankind will be free from the tyranny of “what are you doing now.”
David
You can try this tool out – http://internetducttape.com/2008/04/21/import-twitter-to-friendfeed/ – I’ve tried it but not had much luck. It should help locate people on twitter and subscribe to their friendfeed but I think the manual method might be better. Thats probably the only thing holding me back from FriendFeed. I guess I need to do the dave thing and go through everyone I follow and find them on FF or imaginize them.
Dave, I’ll be sad to miss your tweets but I guess I’ll have to move to FF more permanently
Or give this a go!
http://mdjensen.com/friendfeedfinder/
Dom, I’ve already done those things. In fact, they don’t work for me anymore as I have already dismantled my Twitter network months ago. One by one I would either add people on FriendFeed and unsubscribed them from Twitter or if they didn’t have FF accounts I’d set up an imaginary friend for them. I’ve been eliminating imaginary friends as people come on board with FriendFeed. My migration is already done.