The Reason Why I Returned to Twitter: Track is Dead
September 16, 2008
I’ve been away from Twitter for about 4 months as I’ve stated in previous posts. Many of you know my frustrations regarding Twitter’s smoke & mirrors routine when it comes to uptime and availability. Most of this angst was driven by my lust for Twitter’s absent Track feature. Last week at bearhug camp, the guys at Twitter were interviewed by Steve Gillmor and Dave Winer regarding various hot topics such as Track. Leo Laporte was kind enough to stream the entire event live. While I didn’t learn anything new from their (Twitter’s) responses, I did finally come to one important realization:
Track is not coming back.
At least, not in the form that I previously loved. I loved that I had access to a ginormous global chat room and I had the ability to filter it for terms that I cared about. The potency of information I received was unparalleled. It was fast, real-time, and personal. Those days are gone and I’ve accepted it. The stable Twitter that everyone loves today is not the same one of the past. Many people are content with it and are happy with a web based term searching feature called Twitter Search. For me, it’s not the same, but I have to let it go and move on.
Track/XMPP has proven to be a technological hurdle as our friends at identi.ca are learning. It’s a beast. They haven’t been able to keep their implementation going consistently with just a small fraction of what Twitter has to deal with. My issue up until this moment was that I didn’t want to believe that Twitter’s “firehose” of information for everyone was too much for any current implementation to handle. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle.™
In short, I’ve tasted Track and it was so delicious, the flavor still lingers on my tongue, but I’ve got to let it go.
So, by letting go of the possibility that Track is ever going to exist again, I am able to use Twitter again. Twitter, in its current crippled state, has proven to be fairly stable. By disabling my beloved Track, and other back end tweaks that they have no disclosed, they seem to be able to handle the load.
I also went on record that I didn’t want to use Twitter as a spamming/marketing platform as most people seem to want to do. Over the next few days/weeks, I’m going to try to reinvent Twitter’s usefulness to me. Since I once was more a consumer of information more than a provider, I now have to find a balance using the tools that are available to me. Of course, I could try to cling to my roots and use TwitterSpy, but then I would be lying to myself.
So as of today, I’m officially back on Twitter. The means by which I will use it is yet to be determined, but if you want to follow me on there, I’m at http://www.twitter.com/bwana.
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