I have a couple issues with Twitter, and no, my issues don’t have to do with the fact that most of the “tweets” are completely useless…though, do we really need to know what Ashton Kutcher had for breakfast?!
First of all, you can’t have multiple feeds. What if I was going on a trip to Europe and I wanted to keep my friends and family up to date on my trip. The easiest way to do this would be to use one of the many iPhone Twitter applications to send updates to my account, and then my family and friends could follow my feed and know what I’m up to. Now, if my trip to Europe turns out to be like all the European trips I’ve seen in movies, there will probably be some debauchery. Being a guy, I would probably want to brag about my “achievements” to my buddies, but I wouldn’t want my family to read about it. It would be nice to be able to have multiple feeds and choose which feed to post to. I could have one for my family, and one for my friends, and each would only get the updates I allow them. Something even better would be to be able to create multiple feeds AND create different workflows, and you can post to a workflow, and that workflow would then post to one or more of your feeds. So, if I had an update I only wanted my buddies to see, I could post to my “buddies” workflow and that would post to my “buddies” feed. And if I had an update that I wanted everyone to see, I could post to the “all” workflow which would then post to the “buddies” and “family” feeds so everyone would see it. Now, I know I can create mulitple accounts and have one account for my friends, and one account for my family, but this means too different logins, two different passwords, and what if I forget which account I am currently logged into on my iPhone and accidentally post an update to the wrong account? Badness…that’s what would happen. I’d probably get a call from my mom telling me that she raised me better than that. Plus, I couldn’t post to both accounts without sending the same post twice.
Secondly, it’s slow as shit in a can. Ruby is a good scripting language, and Ruby On Rails is a great framework for prototyping, but I don’t think it is fit for a website that gets millions of requests a day. It needs something a little snappier.
Now, with that out of the way, Twitter does have some good things going for it, so it isn’t all bad.
Tags: Social Networking, Twitter