I will now bitch about Twitter in 140 words or less

My replies page (twitter.com/replies) has been down for over a month. “That page doesn’t exist!” Reply from Twitter: It’s a bug. No duh.

1. [notjackobrien]

   140 characters or fewer, Joel.

   Sorry… inner English teacher coming out, I’ll stop now.

2. [Anonymous]

   @notjackobrien: your inner English teacher needs to go back to school. That comma after “out” should be a full stop (period, in American English) or, just possibly, a semi-colon.

3. [Joel Johnson]

   In fairness, it was also under 140 words!

4. [Scoplecopter]

   http://identi.ca/

   It’s a completely open-source and portable solution for microblogging (not to mention totally decentralized via federation), although having just recently been released to the masses, it’s still quite young.

   They’re currently working on a native API, as well as support for federation over to Twitter’s API.

   Within a year, I’d expect this to be a very viable solution to the problem, heh.

5. [maryr]

   Erm…. YMMV, but mine works (most days).

6. [zuzu]

   Ok, once upon a time we had finger, then we had presence in IM clients such as ICQ and AIM (i.e. the “away message”). Then I think LiveJournal had something, but I never got into that scene. Now we have “twitter shitters”.

   What was wrong with finger?

   Why are we constantly re-implementing functionality in a different incompatible way every couple of years?

7. [mdhatter]

   Some bugs are hidden features. This sounds like one.

8. [jrishel]

   go to summize.com (now search.twitter.com)) and search for “@joeljohnson” or “to:joeljohnson” and you’ll get a stunning reproduction of a replies page. I used this while my replies page was down, but it is very odd that yours still is.

9. [chris23]

   and right now twitter has been down for hours.

10. [acb]

    @Zuzu: I thought “Twitter shitters” were those marketing scumbags who mass-friend thousands of people on the off-chance that one will follow their URL and buy into whatever pyramid scheme they’re pushing.

11. [chronophobe]

    Twitter seems like some fad twelve year old girls would be into. Why do we need more data and cluttered minutiae? It’s like everyone’s turning into tiny self-advertising, self-indulgent ad agencies, spewing more meaningless bits into the ether.

12. [danegeld]

    Did you get that feeling that Twitters business plan is strangely reminiscent of that South Park episode with the gnomes and the underpants?

    Well, perhaps inevitably the accountants caught up with them, and this morning Twitter announced they can’t actually afford to send SMS in Europe, Australia or New Zealand, and so they’ve …. stopped.

    It’s a bit sad to watch them first turn off comments, then break permalinks to their own blog post announcing their imminent demise.

    http://blog.twitter.com/2008/08/changes-for-some-sms-usersgood-and-bad.html#links

    R.I.P.