The Week’s Whale Sized Workaround

I had the idea for this post earlier this week when I realized that Twitter's API being broken was causing issues, but we still weren't leaving. Cyndy covered that failure of Twitter users to vote with our feet in her article on Tweeterboard closing, and I touched on it briefly this week when I talked about Twitter telling its own users to access their replies through Summize. In spite of all of this, we aren't leaving - we're creating workarounds.

Why aren't we leaving? Twitter has found a unique formula of simplicity and fun that flat out hasn't been duplicated yet elsewhere. It's a culture of conversation, of touching base, it's easy to use and has a quick learning curve, and no other service has tapped that niche. Until one does, Twitter users will continue to stay on, complaining. At this point even the complaints have become a unifying factor, as if all the users of Twitter are happy hostages who gladly have developed Stockholm Syndrome.

Sure, some services have sprung up this week trying to compete with Twitter, but so far they are more fail than the Fail Whale for me. Identi.ca is the worst offender. It lost me the moment it forced me to sign a Creative Commons license for my content, posts, etc to sign up. The license forces the user to accept a level of Creative Commons that allows reposting and reuse of the content. That gets a resounding NO from me, since I have no idea what content I'd want to share yet, and I would want different levels of licensing for different types of content. Because of that forced compliance issue, Identi.ca lost one user right off the bat.

Another new service that popped across my radar was Kwippy. Kwippy is not intuitive to set up at all, and I can see the initial interface being a turn off for many. I'm not sure how much I'll use Kwippy, as it currently has no desktop client interface, offering only a chunky looking web UI that I found a bit unappealing. Even so, this social media addict dutifully bookmarked it, just in case. Kwippy uses your GTalk or Yahoo IM clients to post status messages to the Kwippy user page, and offers ways to follow and be followed like Twitter. If you use it and like it, come by and tell me why, maybe I'm just not seeing the appeal after a quick use.

If you, too, are a happy hostage unwilling to move to Plurk or FriendFeed full time, what can you do? At one point this week my workaround to find full Twitter functionality without, well, Twitter, involved having Twhirl open in the hopes that Twitter would come back online, and opening my FriendFeed page in Twhirl as well to cut back on trips to the desktop. I then opened my Pownce desktop client for the first time in months (as I had set my Twhirl to post my tweets to both Pownce and Jaiku I have not had to visit them in a while). Then I downloaded Duncan Riley's Plurk desktop client, PlurkAir and opened my Plurk page there. Once I had all of those running I turned on Adium and logged in to all of my instant message clients.

I didn't stop there. I also used Flock 2 to set up feeds for my favorite Tweeters via Summize, using the search code snippet I talked about here the other day to make them as specific as possible. Once I had a whole group of Summize feeds set up for each of my favorite Tweeters, I knew Flock would notify me of their activity with a little orange glow around the "person" symbol. Lastly, I went to FaceBook and created a feed for my FaceBook friends also. All of those things are workarounds for what I'm usually able to accomplish just by having Twhirl and Adium open. That simplicity, that ability to do much with so little, is why I love Twitter more than anything else. Wouldn't you, if what you normally do with a couple of applications when Twitter is working takes so many more to accomplish when it isn't? What do you do to workaround and contact your network when Twitter is down? Let us all know in the comments.