Twitter Exposed?

I've never been one to jump on band wagons, and today is no different. There's been a lot of Twitter-hate going around, and a lot of it may be warranted, and with Twitter not being up front with its guests that use Twitter day in and day out its no wonder that people were becoming upset. A great number of them are already migrating to FriendFeed, but a great many are hanging on for dear life onto what is a revolutionary piece of software that has connected people across the world and industries in real time with a simple question..."What are you doing?"

TechCrunch posted a great video interview with Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone conducted by Robert Scoble. It was a lengthy interview but we have approximately half an hour of viewing time and in it there are a lot of questions and points that came to mind. First thing I'd like to point out is that at the beginning of the interview, perhaps the first ten minutes, Evan and Biz look unprepared for the interview, especially Evan.

They are quoted as saying, "The fact that people are frustrated is a sign that we built something people care about." Do you ever go into business with the expectation of failing? I just find it weird that you would spend time developing, seek funding, and release something that you'd expect to fail. Sure hindsight is 20/20, but a better scalability plan should have been in place from the start.

Portions of Twitter service are down, most importantly being the IM client. They claim that only a small percentage use the IM client; I'd like to know what they are smoking. Almost everyone I know uses the IM client because it's easier than logging directly into the site. I for one use Ping.fm as my IM client of choice to post across my social networks and so far it has not been affected by the down time. If you need an invite, drop me a line.

At the half way point Scoble asks them how long they predict problems to continue and they have the nerve to say that problems could last for months. Months? Seriously? That's like selling me a car and saying that while not all the kinks are worked out, take it home, we've disabled anti-lock breaks, the A/C, and the lights, but in time we'll have all this worked out. Just seems shoddy to me.

I would honestly prefer they shut Twitter down for a week or two and work everything out. Promise the guests who use their application an ETA and work 24/7 to make it happen. With the enormous funding they just recently received I'm sure they can put the people on it.

An interesting thought that came to mind while watching the video is this, what do you all think of offering a Twitter Pro account? Many businesses are now using Twitter to advertise, market, and brand themselves by reaching out to a community. Since the software is being tasked so heavily, would it be prudent to have the so called "power users" pay into their service for the ability to be able to do this? Just a thought, I'd like to hear your opinions on this matter.

I love Twitter, I truly hope they can recover from this and focus more time on expanding the possibilities as opposed to having to back track to make corrections.