When Twitter first came out, I gave it a try and I was underwhelmed. After my initial tryout for a couple of days, I ditched it. I didn’t really see the point – I had too much to read anyway, and too many distractions, without needing another.
In the last few months I’ve read a few articles about how Twitter is working as a sort of ESP for people, keeping them in touch with friends and family who are far away. I thought maybe I’d misjudged, but it was my friend Geoff Jones who is an ardent Twitter fan that persuaded me to give it a second try.
I’m sad to report that my experience hasn’t been great.
It’s not that Twitter isn’t a good idea. If the flow rate of Twitters is reasonable, then I think it’s a very valuable way to keep in touch with what’s happening. The problems I’ve found have been in the execution rather than the idea.
When I gave it a second whirl, one of the first things I did was to import a few mail addresses from my contacts list in Gmail. That worked well. But then I wanted to find and follow a few more people, so I uploaded a list of mail addresses to Gmail. Then I tried to import and got the (now notorious for Twitter users) POST DATA required error.
It took about a month for Twitter to fix this. I would have thought that gaining new users would be a priority, and that this would have been fixed a lot faster. Apparently not.
I am still not able to import my Gmail contacts. I no longer get the bald POST DATA required error, instead I now get a message telling me that I have no contacts. That’s quite annoying because I have quite a big list, and I’m quite sure that some of them are using Twitter too. I’d really like to know who they are without searching all the way through my contacts by hand. I’m not the only one with this problem – the first report I can find about it is 3 months old.
Twitter has had a number of high-profile outages. I suspect that the reason it takes so long to fix things like my two problems is that they are too busy firefighting huge problems to worry about smaller issues.
I will continue to try from time to time to add my contacts to Twitter. I find though that I’m not twittering much. There’s very little point.
Overall: D minus. They have a beautifully designed web site. They’ve obviously spent lots of money and time on it, but it matters not a jot if their core services don’t work.
-
Yo Geoff…
I think it’s safe for me to say that your Twitter experiment is incomplete as yet.
My curve into Twitter followed yours, largely. But I persevered through the second encounter, and have some findings.
1. It takes about a month of total immersion in Twitter to ‘get’ it.
2. Once you ‘get’ it, it becomes a life-changer and definitely a game-changer.
3. I now get almost all of my new business queries through Twitter. WITHOUT me being a spammer or marketeer. I am very active in sqaushing spam. And I avoid ’selling’ on Twitter. Nevertheless, the business flows.
‘Total immersion’ translates to:
O Following at least 100 quality tweeters.
O Having at least 100 of your own tweets, preferably interesting ones.
O Tweeting at least 5 times a day.
O Responding to the tweets of others.
It’s alchemical what happens next. Regardless of the Twitter backend troubles.
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link: http://www.tangledtime.com/wp-trackback.php?p=91