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 posted by notjackobrien , July 17, 2008 11:56 AM]

140 characters or fewer, Joel.

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

[#2 posted by Anonymous , July 17, 2008 12:12 PM]

@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 posted by Joel Johnson , July 17, 2008 12:16 PM]

In fairness, it was also under 140 words!

[#4 posted by Scoplecopter , July 17, 2008 12:38 PM]

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 posted by maryr , July 17, 2008 12:52 PM]

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

[#6 posted by zuzu , July 17, 2008 4:58 PM]

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 posted by mdhatter , July 17, 2008 7:56 PM]

Some bugs are hidden features. This sounds like one.

[#8 posted by jrishel , July 17, 2008 9:56 PM]

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 posted by chris23 , July 18, 2008 2:19 AM]

and right now twitter has been down for hours.

[#10 posted by acb , July 18, 2008 2:02 PM]

@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 posted by chronophobe , July 18, 2008 8:14 PM]

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 posted by danegeld , August 15, 2008 6:28 AM]

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.