The Trouble With Twitter

I've often wondered why a lot of people use Twitter. I've never talked about it with other people before today, when another tech blogger brought it to my attention. I use the social networking site myself, but I've been using other social networking sites as well. In my opinion Twitter fails in a lot of things and the only thing it's supposed to focus on isn't that great at all. In fact it sort of fails in that respect as well. Okay, you deserve an explanation and I'm going to give an explanation, but to make things more concrete I'll be using other social networking sites, mainly Plurk, as a basis for comparison.

'What is Plurk?' you might ask.
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It’s something like Twitter but with several differences that I believe are more engaging and user-friendly. Twitter's main service is to allow its users to convey their tweets to their friends online. It does exactly that but at some degree of annoyance. The biggest issue I have with Twitter is that it has gone "down" several times because of ineffective management. In short, too many people use Twitter and it's caused their systems to go down at one point or another. This has annoyed me a lot. Facebook provides for a larger number of users but I have personally never had severe problems with Facebook. There was a time that Facebook chat was down, but full functionality was never disabled.



In my opinion, there are too many spammers on Twitter and although you don't post pictures or other personal effects on your account, you'll still have several privacy issues.

Tweets, as many would describe, are like online text messages that you send everyone who's following you. It's short and simple enough to use and you get some measure of control over it. It's just not as user friendly as it should be. For one thing you need to use all these commands like @ or #. A first time user may not understand all of that. You can chat with another person using the @ command so they know that you're tweeting about them. It can go like this: "@Bob Hope you show up later."

Bob will now know I'm talking about him when he clicks at the @Bob command on his menu. Plurks function like tweets but with more flexibility. You can send plurks just like tweets but you also have the option of sending private plurks to a select group of friends.

Your page can be edited easily enough and you can have additional features through the use of the Karma system. Karma is a sort of rater that grows whenever you plurk or whenever you invite a friend to join. When it grows you gain rewards like additional emoticons that you can put on your plurks or additional designs that you can place on your page.

Unlike Twitter, you don't just link pictures or videos; you can share them through your plurk. If a link is too long, you have the option of changing the text of your link so that it’ll look less bulky and more attractive.

Chatting with your friends online is also possible through the site because any of your friends can leave a comment on your plurk and you can have a conversation through that.

All in all, I think that Twitter has very little functionality and its huge list of users is somewhat of a positive and a negative thing. Although you can use it to connect to a huge network of people, there are also a lot of strangers that can connect with you and some of them are either spammers or online predators.