Onion Doesn’t Like Unstable Social Media

I’m a super fan of Twitter.  In fact, I think I’m pretty much in love with Twitter.  It’s true.  We’re getting married on  Tuesday.  You should come.  Just don’t bring any cupcakes.  Like, seriously, I’ve eaten way too many of those these past few days.  And then I have to give them to Twitter and boy is Twitter starting to get high blood pressure.

Uhm.

So, yeah, Twitter is lovely.  It’s addictive and delicious and a great way to tell other people things which they never needed to realise. 

You know, tweets about bowel evacuations and crabs.  Not that I’ve ever tweeted about those things. Like, ever.

And whilst Twitter is wonderfully delicious in all forms social, I have a massive gripe with it all.

Errors.

A long time ago I used to have a MySpace.  I know, right? What was I thinking?  If I remember rightly, every other time I pressed something, MySpace crashed.  Or was over capacity.  Or some combination of the previous.  I hated it.

Now, when I joined Twitter I expected it to be a bit more advanced than ye olde MySpace.  After all, it’s far more attractive and far less complex.  So, naturally, I would expect far fewer errors.  Makes sense, right? 

Apparently, wrong.

Now, though I no longer use the web interface for Twitter (Spaz and Tweetdeck are my applications of choice), I can’t help but be frequently infuriated when trying to expand my following circle.

Picture this:  I’m on Spaz and it’s a Friday. Because it’s a Friday, it naturally means that it’s Follow Friday.  So I’m flicking through my tweets and looking at all of the different people that are being suggested to me, and I chance upon someone who I think seems pretty awesome.

Now, because following people on TweetDeck is largely unreliable (at least for me) — and following on Spaz is non-existent (as far as I know) — I’m thus left to go on the Twitter main site and follow them ‘manually’.

So I get onto Twitter.  I spend 5 minutes going through the reams of passwords that I have.  I finally log on.  I flick down and after several errors and refreshings-of-the-page,  I finally manage to find the tweets listing the people I want to follow.

Awesome.  It only took me about 15 minutes to get here.

So I right click on their name and open their twitter stream up.  I click follow.

“Uh oh!  An error has occured.  Try refreshing the page.”

I refresh it.  I click again.

“Uh oh! An error has occured.  Try refreshing the page.”

Grrr.  I refresh it and click AGAIN.

“Uh oh! An error has occured.  Try refreshing the page.”

In my frustration, I click on the ‘follow’ button about 20 times rapidly.

Oh look!  By brute force, I’m now following them.

Call me impatient, but I’m one of those people that prefer things to work on their first try.

And I love you Twitter, I really do, but if you’re going to make me jump through hoops I’m just going to continue to complain.

Because frankly?  You have the highest-increasing membership rates of any social website in the world.

You have endless amounts of potential to earn revenue.

You get publicity from newspapers, television and reports on crime.

You help prevent suicide and allow great relationships to form.

So why, oh why, is it impossible for your web interface to work properly?  It’s like you’ve baked a cake but it’s still raw in the centre.  Everyone has to eat around it. 

It’s just not right.

And so Twitter, here’s me asking.  Here’s me requesting.  Will you please — PLEASE – make your main site a little more stable?

Because frankly?  Good ol’ users like me are getting tired of having to use brute force when our mothers told us not to.