Is The Social Web About To Kick Twitter Out Of The Lifeboat?

When the ship is sinking and the closest land is a tiny island, you want things and people that work and that bring benefit to the table in your lifeboat - it increases your chances of survival. This is Life 101 level knowledge, yet Twitter seems to have forgotten it lately. Even writing this post makes me cringe a bit - you all know I am a heavy Twitter user and a total cheerleader for the service. That said, these last few days have been especially difficult to watch and experience.

Over the past few months, I've been annoyed by the Twitter users who are so vocal in complaining about what is a free service. I still stand by that. If Twitter could get its act together, I'd be happy to pay a nominal monthly fee (under $10 - I am on a freelance writer salary, after all) for the service. If enough of us pay, it should at least cover operating costs.

However, if they can't stop tripping over their own feet at Twitter HQ and get it even minimally functional at all times, I wouldn't be willing to pay a cent. I already pay through the nose for subpar services like Comcast Cable. I don't need to add another outlay for something that doesn't work half the time to my list of expenses, especially in this economy where every belt is being tightened.

What got my attention this week and finally flipped my switch from "Oh, but they are trying so hard" and "Oh, they just grew too fast and need better scalability" and other enabling thoughts was how their lack of preparation and inability to scale affected some of their core, high end users. These people use the service a lot, but no where near Scoble levels.

Queen of Spain, Pistachio and others do not Tweet enough to cripple a system. Even so, they found themselves unable to talk for nearly a day (in some cases longer). Cut off from replies and direct messages, unable to see their profiles (or seeing a blank page like I still am when I log in), they were left floundering in the shallows, left to use third party services.

Speaking of third party services, Twitter even told users to use Summize instead of Twitter because of their disabled replies tab in the last few days. If you have to refer your very enthusiastic, long suffering, core users to a third party service that taps your API… you have failed in your mission. That is completely unacceptable.

There were cries all over the social web for Twitter to buy Summize, for Twitter to fix things as soon as possible, for people to use Plurk (heaven forbid) and more. What got me, though is that on the Twitter blog we hear all this talk of new hires, yet for each new hire and financial backer brought on board the service seems to sink a little lower - too many cooks, perhaps.

All the while the main blog is touting new additions to the Twitter crew (currently bearing a strong resemblance to the shipwrecked SS Minnow castaways), the Status blog is telling us we don't have essential items, like a replies tab or a way to paginate. Heck, the IM, Track and With Others features have been broken for months.

My question is this - why should a company without a plan of its own buy out a company that obviously has a better plan in place? Should the Twitter / Summize buyout idea go the other way? Heck, I'd even support a FriendFeed / Twitter buyout if the end result was a prettier, easier to use interface for FriendFeed and a working Twitter. At this point, anything has to be an improvement over constantly being asked to pretend everything is ok.