It's now about a month since I said I'd try the Twitter phenomenon out, after seeing a few Facebook friends use it for intriguing purposes.

For example, I love the way you can drop down what you are doing, or a random thought that you think someone else might be interested in. Believe it or not, I often have moments when I want to express 140 characters in concise form. I've seen users use it to provide status, thoughts, ask questions and highlight recent blogging entries. It is for this reason I thought I'd join in with the Twittering.

 Initially, I thought it would be a great way to crank up some interest in the TT-related project I was working on. This project was challenging, and quite stressful at times and is the focus of the iomtt.com site, allowing users from around the world to be able to access times, data, webcams and radio broadcasts for the bike racing that takes place at this time every year on The Isle of Man. Maybe I could even get some sales from it? Then, I also used it to highlight random thoughts and when I posted a blog entry. (No doubt I'll do the same again to highlight this post).

It seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, it is full of "noise". Noise that I find can be completely meaningless unless you know the people Twittering, personally. Half the messages are also written in some form of code, in order to get messages within the 140 character limit. You thought text messages were bad, having to limit to 255 characters - you want to try Twittering and reading other peoples' twitters/tweets/whatever. So, assuming you can apply a bit of noise reduction by occasionally reducing the number of "followers" you have, I can limit updates to just those people I know and am actually interested in. (Incidentally, I have had a number of people following me, who I have never met, so how come? Do they randomly select me, or have I been recommended?)

I have a big gripe with the service, however. It is unreliable - really unreliable. Think of the technology behind the scenes - you have 1x web form, which takes a single line of text and updates a database somewhere, which is used to output the change to somewhere else. Really simple, yes? Apparently not. I have lost count of the times the service fails to update my Facebook page, faisl to update even its own status ... or just outright fails. It has worse reliability than Facebook for errors. At least Facebook is never "down".

Twitter is far too complex. It uses AJAX, which takes forever, the whole point of AJAX is to make the user feel that a web application is responsive. Twitter just sits there with a spinning thing spinning away for 30 seconds or so while it updates itself. I'd rather a conventional POST, to be honest, at least I'd feel like something was happening.

Obviously, this service is very popular, and clearly needs some degree of load balancing. I wonder how this has been implemented, if at all. The site has recently come out of a particularly poor period of unreliability which saw various services being turned off, the site being down and a database crash. I mean, a database crash? How often does that happen? Maybe they should be using some Microsoft tech instead of this open source gubbins they seem to be using. I've never had a SQL Server database fail on me.

I have learned a lot, and have actually found some Twitterers enlightening, as it has opened my eyes to other professions which I always like. The idea is a sound one, though I do have misgivings about egotistical natterings that have no real purpose. If I post something, I hope people find it interesting, particularly when talking about the TT project I was involved with, whether it resulted in any sales I don't know and probably doubt. It is also great for an asynchronous chat. People can ask you questions and when you update your feed, you can reply. Finally, it's a great way of letting people know you've just written something enlightening and insightful, much like this post? No?

So, I think my initial reluctance to use the service has been overcome. Though if I were to continue using it, I would hope that the service reliability improves significantly in terms of uptime, speed and suitability for purpose. It is such a simple concept, it would be a shame to see it fail. It would also be good if there was some way I could select Twitterers that were interesting to me, for example, e-Marketing twitterers would be good at the moment! Anyone?

Thanks must go to the following Twitteroo's: sherrilynne, OwenC and dunkjmcd who very kindly left feedback for me about my new web site - via Twitter.