Yes. Prepare for a long rant. I’m getting really sick with Twitter being screwed up and not improving at upgrades and time goes. Before I go berserk and close my totally useless account, let me state a few things about how BAD Twitter has became in the last weeks. You think SL is hopelessly borked? Well just let me do a little list of Twitter irks and twitches to give you an idea of what borked really means.

I should state tho all of these problems appeared long ago, they are since about 2 weeks absolutely recurring and out of control.

1. Page cannot load, application errors, “Something is technically wrong”, Internal errors 500, blank page, incomplete page load; Yes, you know the kind. You know it because it fucking happens day in, day out. It’s not all to have load balanced web servers, fellas. It’s even better when you develop on application technologies that are PROVEN and TESTED to scale better. I will pass on what technologies Twitter is built on to avoid a flamewar, but let’s say I’m not very impressed.
2. Extremely slow page loading; Frustrating. Very much so. Why? First because you loose messages. And you twitterers knows that nothing can screw a first inspiration like having to write the same inspired tweet again. Secondly, because its just unacceptable from a user point of view. I know those engineers thinks they are pretty smart, but let them learn about the usage curve. If your damn service stops being responsive all the time, people will click and click and click out of sheer frustration, further loading your application servers, until it goes out for hours. Twitter, scale or die!
3. Timeline borkage, people not seeing followed people tweets, scrambled order of the messages; It goes on. I’m not sure how Twitter cache technology works, but it is total fail. Since replies are mostly screwed up, again, people starts using Tweetscan or similar things, furthermore increasing the pressure on those poor database servers. Again, good way for this database to jump in the next tarpit to stop suffering.
4. Failed SMS delivery, truncated SMS, and truncated parts that never gets through; Classic. What makes Twitter anything like useful is the ability to forward DMs or some people’s replies to your SMS phone, making it a mobile broadcast platform. If you ask me, without that feature, Twitter is pretty useless. Or greatly diminished and making it feel like any other micro blogging platform like Jaiku or Pownce. Well, Twitter is really good at failing doing this properly. Very often, SMS don’t get through at all. But most frustrating is getting part 2 of 2 of a message saying: “fuck” and not knowing if the sender meant “I need to fuck” or “You little fuck”. Yeah extreme but classic example. I can’t tell you how frustrating that is, being isolated on the road, and getting half baked messages because Twitter is not behaving again.
5. Failed email follow notifications; This is relatively recent, but very very annoying. Since a few weeks, I don’t receive half of the new follower notifications. Not only this is very annoying, this is dangerous. You cannot know if someone stalks you. How can someone control his list of followers if you don’t even get a notification? And should I mention how ridiculously unmanageable the Twitter follower list is when you have over 20 followers? If you cannot manage the users on your social network, well it’s no longer a social networking platform. It is just a platter of delicious fail, and you must eat it.
6. Twitter API failures; frequent and redundant. I don’t use any API enabled applications, thanks gawd. Most of my friends to, through Twitbin, Twhirl, and so on. Sometimes the API stops being responsive for hours. Again, people starts hammering Twitter’s web interface craving for their replies.

This state of borkage is getting worse and worse every week. Yeah, worse than SL is borked lately. That says a lot. Twitter does not have 1/100th of the complexity SecondLife has. So there’s no comparing to be done.

Seriously, Twitter, get your game together. Twitter is surely one of the coolest web applications I have ever used. When it works. I would be VERY sad seeing it fail as a socialnet platform, since I am probably one of your biggest fangirl and certainly an evangelist, having brought dozens of my friends to try and get hooked to the platform too.

Twitter is simple. Fix it, and now. You guys are surely cool, but you have venture capital and investors. Hire someone that knows about service scalability. Outsource it for all I fucking care about. But if you don’t do it, and soon enough, you will lose momentum and get eaten by people that actually knows what they are dealing with. Now Twitter, it is time to decide if, with your surge of popularity, will emerge into a real mature platform, or if you will stay at the stage of startup infancy.

Because I’m so sick of it, as much as I’m addicted to it, as much as I love and care for the marvelous people that follows me and I follow back, if that keeps up, I will stop loosing my time and I will drop Twitter like a rock.