Jen's dashboard

Yes, unfortunately, IM is still offline. See the Twitter Status blog at http://status.twitter.com for details – mdy, on June 23, 2008 01:24

This is twitter.com/Vicpodcaster

Looks like IM is still down.

I cant get add twitter to gtalk.

Aw crap. D: I really wanted to register my IM.
I hope they fix it soon. :[

Special request to Twitter. Please don't scorn me everyone, but I did something stupid when the bot started sending messages again. Impulsively, I tried deactivating and reactivating my IM service, to see if that would let it accept messages. Of course, it didn't take my confirmation code, as I should have foreseen. I didn't write anything here because I assumed IM service was on the verge of return, but now since it seems once again to be down indefinitely, I was wondering if the Twitter folks could manually reconfirm my Twitter IM link? It would make me *really* appreciative.

Agree it would be nice if there's a note at the http://twitter.com/devices page regarding IM being offline.

To be fair though, people who already have IM verified have a note on their sidebar that says IM is offline (I see it on my sidebar). They apparently don't display the same sidebar note for people who don't have IM verified (I guess the idea was that it's not relevant to them so why display it).

Agree with the last three comments - there is no excuse for the level of service that twitter clients are getting. There are a lot of things that they should have done to minimize all the frustration generated. Clients don ́t want to know the technical side involved in providing the IM app. They want to use a service that works as it suppose to work.

This is not the way to treat clients....

i'm surprised they haven't removed the IM options on the user interface - or at least added a note that they won't work. leaving them there as-is implies that IM still works and fuels the confusion/annoyance of new users or those who haven't been following the updates on the blog.

I agree, it would have been nice to see more updates on it rather than simply "offline". I always like it when companies are straight up about whats going on. It would be cool if Twitter could give us regular detailed updates on the status of reworking IM, just so we can see light at the end of tunnel instead of blindly wondering.

Whether I know the technical end of what's going on is hardly relevant. And I know for some people using IM isn't important. But it is for me. So in my situation, here are the important facts:

1 - Twitter doesn't have IM going and there is not even a rough guess as to when it will be back.
2 - Twitter use to have IM, but it died on May 23 with a note saying that it should be back shortly.
3 - Twitter never told us they are building something new. Unless I missed their announcement, it took a regular user such as myself guessing and the company confirming this fact. And I really hope I just missed Twitter's announcement on this one.

If Twitter hadn't had IM at all, I wouldn't be using it.

If Twitter had said from the start, or very close to May 24 (ie no more than 3 or 4 business days later at the very latest) what was going on then at least we would have known for longer. As it stands, the oldest announcement I've seen is 7 days ago.

I'll still be checking, because I really want to use Twitter. But I didn't sign up for it because I wanted to post status updates or anything. I signed up because of how it integrated with other programs that I use with Twitter IM.

You patently didn't really use the IM system. It was broken. It would randomly disconnect your account from the system. Messages would sometime send, but not always and I imagine that the volume of traffic being handled by the Jabber server(s) was immense.

There are in the region of 1 942 270 Twitter accounts (http://www.twitdir.com/) with thousands of new accounts daily (according to stats I just read) if only 25% (made up figure) of those users are online at any one time that's 486000 users. If 15% of those users are using IM as their method of sending and receiving, that 73000 people for whom Twitter needs to process messages for every time a message sent from every single client, be that an Adobe AIR client, web applications and blog panels, SMS, the twitter site itself or any of the other many clients that are attached to Twitter via its API.

That's an immense amount of processing - you might think its easy to do, because twitter made it so seamless and easy for you to use - but at the rate that twitter is growing the old IM system was getting more and more flaky. There is no way it could cope with the usage now.

Building a new system from scratch is not a 2 day job, unless you know exactly what you want and throw two lots of infinite monkeys at it! Building a robust, scalable system will take time and they are working on it as fast as possible (as can be seen from other posts/comments/blogs/tweets).

Try one of the other clients or apps instead : http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps
I particularly like Thwirl at the minute

Also take a look at http://twitterfacts.blogspot.com/ for some facts and figures on twitter usage, so you get an idea of the enormity of the task being undertaken by twitter's dev team!

hmmm I'll love to get that but in a stupid move while tryin' to bring it back to life I deleted and started over but now I can't send the confirmation :( – vaz, on June 19, 2008 05:05

thanks! – Jen, on June 19, 2008 04:59

Agree with the last two commenters. This is getting absolutely ridiculous. It's great to be working on an overhauled system, but why can't you leave the old one operational while you work on the new one? Sure, that's probably naive, but there must be SOMETHING you can do! I'm rapidly losing my Twitter addiction — IM is what fueled it for me.

Yes, unfortunately, IM is still offline, so it's not a problem with your account, but rather a problem with the Twitter IM service itself.

You can see the status of the various Twitter services on the Twitter Status blog at http://status.twitter.com

Also, you may want to follow the main "Twitter IM is offline" thread since that has the most replies and is likely to be where further announcements will be made.

Yes, unfortunately, IM is still offline. You can see the status of the various Twitter services on the Twitter Status blog at http://status.twitter.com

still not online for me...

still offline for me....