Twitter topples over A failed upgrade left the world Twitter-less for several hours last night. The service has now been restored, although users might be getting messages in a mixed-up order for an hour or two. A message on Twitter's blog blamed the failure on "the failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching". An update at 11.51pm …
Those of us who don't mind a bit of live-tweeting events like the World Cup or the XBox Kinect launch or other such life-affirming events do get out the house when Twitter falls down! It has been failing more often these past few weeks, one wonders if the servers really can cope with so many 140-character opinions on the oil spill, ConDem governance, Big Brother, the World Cup....
If all your program does is let a small number of mentally ill people post 140 bytes of data to a database and you still can't get it to run stable for more than a week, maybe you should pack your shit up and go back to the circus because computer programming evidently was not the right career move for you.
Any programmer worth his salt could write a working version of twitter in about half a day. Fortunately no programmer worth his salt WOULD work on an idea so inherently b0rked from the onset as Twitter.
"so you mean there's a 140 character limit on all messages?"
"that's right"
"but that's not enough to do anything useful with"
"precisely, our market research shows that people are not comfortable with thinking. We actively discourage it by making reasoned argument quite literally impossible. That way the feeble minded will return to our site compulsively for the positive social reinforcement they receive when they disseminate small meaningless chunks of data - and we can sell prime advertising space."
Hey, word on the web is that it's full of shit content - no, really!
Just take a look at the typical retarded posts above, from people who really haven't a clue how to leverage technology - nah, much easier to just deride it - that takes no thought, invention or common sense.
Or perhaps they just don't have any friends?
It must be a sad existence being so unbelievably negative and narrow minded - to consider oneself too far above the rest of us to even consider doing something as silly as using Twitter.
Far better to hide behind anonymity and make witty (or should that be twitty?) snide remarks at something they are incapable of understanding.
Leverage, it's all about how *you* use technology, not how others use it!
There's countless totally shit blogs out there, unimaginable amounts of dross gets splattered all website article comments, people while away hours talking BS on chat channels of all types.
And what of it?
Humans like to talk, meaningless banter is what we do well - and inbetween that meaningless banter, perhaps a gem, a diamond in the rough, an incredibly useful link.
Oh, and that killer feature - where you can choose who you want to follow, god damn, what will they think of next? You mean you can filter out the shit? Well fuck me sideways in the hallway - what a concept.
Hey - perhaps you could follow Twitter users who post about your favorite subjects - wow, what an incredible idea- the fact that you may get some useful comment or link - crazy talk!
No, sod this community spirit - who needs it, lets just sit in dark corners of the web and shit over everything we don't agree with - we don't understand it, it's got to be shit, we're so angry about it, we'll post exceptionally stupid comments on Register because it makes us feel clever and cool.
Yeah man, no ways would we ever be seen dead actually making a positive comment about something that's popular - if it's popular, it's got to be shit, right?
Ah wibble to the lot of you trolls above, bunch of sad sad losers.
As for me, fuck it, I don't care, I use Twitter, I'm a Twitter Twat and proud of that - I'm human, I talk shit, just look at all this dross I've just splattered across this page!
Wibble Wibble Wibble Wibble.
I'm going to tweet about it right now, in 140 characters, with a link & a tag.
"I talk shit, just look at all this dross I've just splattered across this page!"
I think that is one of the main criticisms of Twitter. You, because El Reg doesn't have an insane arbitrary limit, were free to vent your rage at the Twitter Haters. Two screenfuls of it, on a netbook machine. Twitter, meanwhile, offers 140 characters. To say more, you have to cheat, write it elsewhere, and tweet a link. Well, shit, you could just provide an RSS feed and skip tweets. People can "follow" those they like, or things that interest them. There is so much dross around it is unlikely to be neither easier nor harder to find something that interests you on Twitter as on the real web. With more words. Actual words. In coherent order.
Expressed as a tweet, this could be: "Matt 89 ++ grrr!, /me < grrr!. Meh." Doesn't quite have the same effect...
A technology stupidity site, not a world famine bulletin, you twat.
We know the world sucks, but the register isn't about fixing that, it's about pissing and moaning about technology. Thanks for playing.
Back on topic- "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU..."
I've not always been a fan, but sometimes Twitter is a truly fabulous tool, not what people claim it is (ie people saying they're having a crap). I was in Thailand for the red shirt crisis (a bunch of nutters going round bangkok throwing grenades, firing AK47s and blowing shit up basically). Twitter was amazing, as the local media was a bit restricted, but people on the ground (many of whom I ended up meeting in person) were able to keep me posted on what was going, where the latest grenades were fired, where to avoid in Bangkok, etc. Generally anything accurate got retweeted and anything bollocks got buried, and you could get info and opinions from both sides of the conflict. It was utterly invaluable at a time when the whole country was in crisis (and we all know how it ended up when the bastards set most of Bangkok on fire). Twitter's reliability is an issue, but to suggest that it is without value is bollocks.
.... I have to confess you make a damn good point Nerd King. It's still total bolx in 99% of situations. But credit where it is due, I shall note henceforth that Twitter has two very useful functions:
2) It helps disseminate news is a fast moving environment.
which I add to the already known:
1) It helps to identify the B Ark candidates.
I was just going to say, would anyone actually miss Twitter (apart from Stephen Fry) if it were to be unavailable for an extended period of time.
But then I remembered that it played an important role in last years recent Iranian protests and may do again another time, so while it may be 99.9% pure #crap and repeated spam - it does have an occasional good use.
Less than 1 second ago via the web.
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