Twitter users are becoming more and more frustrated with outages and blips in service and look more and more willing to turn their words into action. This has never been more evident as of recently when discussions on FriendFeed have created a unified effort to get the attention of the Twitter community. As a result, Twit-Out was created. Twit-Out is (for a lack of a better term) a boycott of Twitter on Wednesday, May 21st. Read more about this on posts by Andrew Dobrow and Bwana McCall, even picked up on the Buzz Out Loud podcast.
Discussions have continued to flare up on FriendFeed.
I’ll be joining the Twit-Out on May 21 even though some people do think it’s nonsense. The main argument seems to be: "Why boycott a free service?" I’ll use an answer I’ve already used on FriendFeed:
“The ‘I don’t pay for it’ argument doesn’t really fly with me. I’ll complain if the bus driver doesn’t turn on the heat in the bus during winter. I’ll complain about the only weather radio station or the only TV news station that goes offline too often. Just because I don’t pay for it, doesn’t mean I have to put up with crappy service.”
What do I hope to achieve by participating?
1. Just being able to do something and let Twitter know that I care.
Yup, I care enough that I’ll join an organized boycott to let them know how much Twitter means to me, I’m hooked, as are many others. However, it’s also to let Twitter know that if they keep doing me wrong, I don’t have to stick around. We all know the impending monetization is coming; if you plan on cashing in on us when the time comes, do us right from now and don’t wait until it’s too late.
2. To big up FriendFeed
So guess where I go when Twitter goes down? Yup, FriendFeed. Why? Great conversations and awesome new content. I think a lot of people dissed FriendFeed early on when there wasn’t quite the user base there is now; so I’m hoping folks will check it out again and see how it is now. Comments and ‘likes’ are jumping, ideas are being exchanged and conversations have taken a whole new turn.
I don’t expect this will change the Twitter servers, and don’t expect a significant amount of the Twitterverse to participate. But I do hope the folks at Twitter take a closer look at the community and figure things out. Yes, no doubt they are working at it, but how long are we going to just roll over on this? Just being able to do something makes me feel better about it. Believe it or not, some feel a little more passionate than me and threaten to leave Twitter for good until their issues are fixed. Jason’s reasoning: does it make sense to rely on an unreliable service?
What do you think, will you participate? Why?
Any other ideas of what we can do besides whine? Or is Twitter not that important to you?
Tags: friendfeed, twitter
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