The Chalkboard

There has been a lot of brouhaha lately about the up/down motion that Twitter takes.  All along I've thought it was a clever idea, and was implemented in a simply clever way.

When I first took notice of twitter, I never thought it would take off even though I thought it was neat.  Almost two years ago, in September 2006, I was on it but couldn't get anyone else I knew to bite.  So I actually used it to create a way for people in my small department at work to alert clients of our status.  This got posted on the Twitter Blog which you can read here.

That died out not too long after that blog post because quite honestly none of my employees thought it was such a grand idea like I did, and it turned out that clients didn't really care where we were at unless they really needed something.  And at that point they weren't going to check a silly Where's IT? page to find out.  They were going to pick up the phone and start calling someone.  I built something I thought was useful on top of Twitter, but the whole time I knew that the rug could have been pulled out from under it.  If so then so what.  If this had played out into something that I really really needed I probably would have built it some other way... not based on a free service that gives no guarantee that it will be there tomorrow.

It seems that there are hundreds of different ways to utilize twitter.  There are tons of different clients for posting to and reading posts.  The API has provided others with a way to utilize the data flowing through Twitter to do some neat things.  I don't even need to actually login to a site like Remember The Milk to add a todo item, I can send a direct message to RTM on Twitter an it gets added.  With so may people wrapping their worlds around Twitter its no wonder that panties are in a twist when it keeps being unresponsive.

Or is it?

My contention is that Twitter is a free service.  Some guys out in San Francisco somewhere had a neat idea one day that they acted on.  However, I don't recall them ever saying "Look at this!  Web 2.0 entrepreneurs everywhere you can make money with this and we promise promise promise that there won't ever be any issues."

I'm going to go out in my front yard and put a big chalkboard.  A place where enterprising people can come by and write clever messages, and advertise their business, and they can build neat things around it.  If a big gust of wind comes by every few days and blows the chalkboard over for a few hours then too bad for you.  Are you going to write an editorial to the paper about what a bad host I am and how I'm an idiot for not know how to keep that damn chalkboard upright?