It’s still not common knowledge among my online friends that I left Twitter on June 06, 2008. It’s been about 4 months since I did, and it seems like a lot has changed. Twitter is receiving praise for their improved “uptime” over the past months. Some have gone on record to state this could be the end of the “fail whale”. I have a problem with this conclusion. When a service is not working, it’s not up.

Period.

Twitter has had issues with their XMPP Instant Messaging (IM) feature and their Track feature. I went on record to state that these features were my primary way to use Twitter. Guess what? Twitter IM and Track are still not working, and it seems like nobody cares. These were two features which made Twitter great in my mind. People seem content with “hacks” such as Summize search (now acquired and called Twitter search) and Twitterspy, which relies on the former. This is not track. This is a hack. I’m not knocking the authors of Twitterspy because I think it’s a great way to get around the lack of track on Twitter. It’s still a hack though.

Know what’s even worse? Twitter is not even acknowledging the return of IM or Track in their latest status blog entries. The last mention of the IM feature was July 7th, 2008, and the last mention of Track was June 13th, 2008:

Track: this service is disabled and will remain offline until it can be reworked

I hope I’m missing something obvious, but I don’t think I am. People like Steve Gillmor believe IM/Track conflicts with the business goals of Twitter and he believes this is why it’s possibly gone forever.

I don’t know the details behind this, but at this point, I don’t care. Either remove the services from your offering or acknowledge your service is not up until IM and Track are working.

When Twitter brings these services back, then I can acknowledge such statements “99.3% uptime”. Until then, I get a bad taste in my mouth when a company says their service is “up” and several features are disabled. Disagree with me? Well, ask Twitter who did they negotiate their Service Level Agreement (SLA) with? How can you boast about uptime with no SLA?

On the flip side, I’m glad to see Twitter getting mainstream coverage, like with CNN. I’m just saddened I can’t use it for anything other than a spamming platform, which I refuse to do. So after 4 months, has Twitter improved? No. Why? Because it’s still down.

Post written by Bwana