Twitter Belly Flops – We’re Long Passed #FailWhale

Twitter Belly Flops on OAuth support and gives new meaning to the term Fail Whale. In fact, they didn’t even bother to do a snazzy ‘we suck’ graphic that the community can banter about. WTF?

I wouldn’t bring attention to this normally, but Twitter OAuth was being heralded as a popular alternative Facebook Connect despite the fact it was in ‘public beta.’

The Twitter Blog was rather defensive about the outage, blaming it on OAuth and pointing out that Yahoo had problems too.

Passing the buck doesn’t fly with me. Admitting that you flopped, taking some responsibility, is a start. Shit happens. But, in my experience, it seems a lot shit happens at Twitter. Bits and pieces of their service are constantly offline or don’t work, despite what their Status blog says.

Another (somewhat related) frustration- 3rd party apps don’t get enough live interaction from Twitter because they have limited intervals in which they can poll Twitter, instead of getting push updates (like Text messages).

For all these failures, ‘Twitter’ is pure genius. Their execution however, has been abysmal; given they are the darling of the tech community.

Public beta means different things to different developers. Google and Facebook have done a commendably good job about launching public beta’s that are ready for public consumption. When Twitter launches something in ‘beta’ again, I don’t doubt it will send shivers up the spines of developers. I don’t think that’s the vibe they wanted to create in their community.

Maybe this post should be directed at all the blogs that overhyped the service, or developers that rolled it out too quickly.

I’ve seen seen Twitter 404 pages turn into the Fail Whale, and the Fail Whale turn into a pop culture phenomenon. It seems like tolerance to these failures is not only accepted, but embraced by the community. How? I don’t know. But it is truly one of the 7 Wonders of Social Media.