Over the past 24 hours, the service we’ve all come to love (and hate) named Twitter has entered bizarro world. People are thoroughly upset about the fact that folks they’ve been following–and more importantly, the count of folks that follow them–have been trimmed down considerably.
It looks like the feeble attempts to reduce spam has also wreaked havoc upon legitimate usage.
Read some of the commentary on their support page at Get Satisfaction for some hilarity on how much this is affecting the lives of its users:
Followers and Following are all gone - when will this be fixed?
It’s strange that after all this time and all the negative press, Twitter manages to alienate even more users. They had finally made their platform a bit more stable by reducing the amount of information that could be grabbed from their API and then they go and screw up everyone’s relationships. I doubt this will be the last straw as there aren’t really any viable alternatives (I mean seriously, can you tell someone at a bar to follow you on Jaiku… would they even know how to spell that easily?) and there are so many other services tied into this service.
To make a long story short: Get your act together Twitter. Please.
Interestingly, they aren’t letting you to log in and their capcha is broken!
Identi.ca might be a good alternative. It’s OSS and they’re pushing the Open MicroBlogging standard to allow communications between different services.
It’s got a decent Canadian geek following, but there’s still a lot of people missing from it. I’m there as tswicegood if ya sign up.
I say: Abandon ship!
Ohh and BTW, Joey, your system recognizes that I’ve came back but errors out unless I re-type my info