Now I have something to think about . . .

Since the last post, I have noticed that the Twitter feed has appeared to load a bit faster. Initally, I had turned off the "What am I doing?" block. I did not leave it off for long, just a couple of hours. I missed having it. I did turn it back on, but Twitter is leaving me something to think about. Actually, it is a couple of things. The performance of Twitter is an issue. I know they are making changes, and trying to setup rate limits and what not for their account. I have to assume they are getting slammed pretty much round the clock by people updating and people using things other than SMS messages to either update or receive the feed. I know it took me about 5 mintues to figure out how to post to Twitter using a command line. And then I saw Dave Taylor's script at Linux Journal for doing the same thing. So I used that. It was better. I made some changes to match how I normally do scripts, but the guts are his. How many other people are doing that? Writting scripts to abuse the Twitter (or any other services) api, and pushed the usage model in a completely different direction from where it was designed for. (I love doing stuff like that!) So, here I am, sending tweets from my phone using PIE or SMS (mostly PIE), sending tweets from about 3 different windows apps, sending tweets from a shell script. And then there are all the ways I'm receiving them. I'm not receiving a single SMS message. I found them to be too distracting. The phone sending me an alert means I either have a meeting, a phone call, or something really needs my attention. I prefer to get tweets via a desktop app, a Firefox extention, and my Chumby. I am also using Twitter to feed into at least two other sites that update themselves from the Twitter feeds of their users. Since the last post, I noticed that Twitter was doing something different. They used to limit clients to 60 or 70 calls an hour. With the number of clients I had going, I would hit that once or twice a day. This weekend I started to notice that I was hitting it way more often. They now have a maximum rate of 30 calls an hour. And honestly, I don't see my web site loading any faster. I do think I want to do something different with the Twitter feed. I think I would rather the nanoposts that I send to Twitter show up in the main feed, with the day's tweets grouped together as a single post. I think I saw something like that one someone elses site, but I can't remember which one. Probably a WordPress thing. But being I'm not a fan of WordPress, I'll have to figure something else out. Or just keep going how I'm going. Of course, this all assumes that I'm going to continue on with Twitter. That's another thing I've been thinking about, what the is going on with Twitter? First there is this collective idea that Twitter is having major performance issues. And then I see this in Tweek's feed: Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service. And then Ars Technica runs with it. One has to wonder about companies that don't feel the need to honor their posted terms of service. And I have to assume that these same companies would have no problem at all going after end users that annoy them one way or another. Where's the accountability? Too many times, I've sen these awful click-thru terms of service and licensing agreements that are impossible to read, and is many ways seem to prohibit the exact activity that the product, wesite or service was pitched to perform or provide. And I get that a company or service, in the interest of protecting itself, must occassionally make changes to their terms. But Twitter is on the record as saying they went with their original TOS intentionally, presumably because of Flickr's repuation, a part of which is their enforcement of their TOS. Twitter's now telling people that's not what they meant to do now? They just slammed a package together and, well, mea culpa, there will be changes to make it harder to pin things on them. I like the Ars article's analysis. What is Twitter, a service or a community? Maybe it is time to evaluate either doing something myself, just for me, or looking at services that target the same space as Twitter. I am not using Twitter as anything than a platform for message passing. Honestly, of the now 29 entities following me on Twitter, only 2 are people I actually know. I think even my skills as a programmer would be enough to put something together to accomplish most of how I'm doing with Twitter, even updating at least one of the other sites. And with only two other people who would really be affected (and I'm fairly certain that either of them would really care if I stopped using Twitter) it may be worth going my own way here.