Twitter is a failure -- /dev/random

Twitter is a failure

Twitter is the asinine service meant to send up to 160 characters of text(sxt?) to an rss feed and a web page that is essentially an RSS feed.

I idioticly tried to convert PasteHell to work with Twitter. And after much teeth gnashing and cursing, I've discovered Twitter is broken, surprising absolutely no-one. If your still with me here are some issues:

E-mail password!!

After you create your account, the very first screen presents you with a dialog asking for the password to your e-mail address. Supposedly this is to see if your friends are already Twits and help you find them. I would say it's really for the developers to steal your account information so they can keep stocked with paint to huff, but that could be construed as slanderous if I said it.

Truncated Twits

You may be inclined to think 160 characters is pretty short. For example this sentence combined with the previous one is just shy of that mark. If on the other hand you get overwhelmed by 2 concurrent sentences, Twitter has you covered. Anything over about 100 characters is shortened and ellips...

Hidden Text

So you've managed to be so wordy that you broke the 100 character limit snce u srsly cnt txt prply. Now if you look at it through the RSS feed(More on that later), it will end in ellipses. If you click on that, it will take you to the main page, with it ending with ellipses. If you click on the ellipses themselves it takes you to a page with just that post. Under default browser settings this text is hidden by botched CSS. So you can never see it unless you are smart enough to shrink your text size, which you aren't or you wouldn't be on Twitter.

Redundant Information

Redundant Information

Redundant Information

So the RSS feed, in all it's glory. The format is something like:

NAME / Twitter
> Name: POST1
.....Name: POST1
> Name: POST2
.....Name: POST2
> Name: POST2
.....Name: POST2
> Name: POST3
.....Name: POST3

They really want to make sure you know which Twit your reading, since you know you may have missed it in the title of the feed, the link going to the page, or the content itself. Also the fact that the RSS feed links take you to a page that has the exact same content as the RSS feed. To be fair repeating information makes sense when you stop and think about, because when you stop and think about it repeating information makes sense.

Rate Limiting

And the straw that broke the camel's back, they limit the amount of posts per hour. So I couldn't use it for what I wanted to do. On top of that it silently fails, meaning you can't easily tell when it stops letting you Twit until you get on the site and try (It pops up some bizarre CSS/Javascript abortion for about 1 second that says you're Twittering too much).

Conclusion

Overall tweeters are speakers designed for high frequencies, although the older you are the less of the spectrum you can hear. They work like all speakers, by having an electromagnetic coil that alternates current with a particular frequency. In case you didn't notice I decided to switch to a related sounding topic since Twitter has now depressed me. It has shown me the future and it is 10 character text messages pasted across animal pictures. It is 5 second video clips running on 24 hour news streams. It is instant gratification with unwarranted self-importance. Okay so I'm being melodramatic (ZOMG, I must post this in a livejournal entry). I just hate internet fads that make it seem like the entire world is retarded :-D And to take something as simple as displaying 160 characters, and doing such a horrible job at it completely blows my mind

Comments(1) 2009-05-12 03:09:08

(2009-05-13 21:27:44) donna said:

that's an hilarious rant. i agree with all of it that i understood. twitter is stupid.

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