Sarah's dashboard

dead issue?

Ping and twittd work great, but if others can figure out how to extend Twitter's services, why can't Twitter? Should I have to put my login ID and password out on all sorts of other services to get the functionality Twitter should provide? – robotfrog, on September 03, 2008 21:35

Wow, I didn't realize that TwitterIM had been out since May. I thought it was just incompatible with iChat, so I gave up on using Twitter all together.

I guess I should give up on the IM service to ever return.

Fwiw... Although Twitter's own IM service is down, I'm able to post updates to Twitter through IM by using a third-party service called http://excla.im, as well as a service at http://ping.fm

To receive tweets via IM, I use a service called Twitt'd at http://twittd.nodehub.com – mdy, on September 03, 2008 17:23

Copied directly from the welcome email (emphasis mine):
"Using Twitter is going to change the way you think about staying in touch with friends and family. Did you know you can send and receive Twitter updates via mobile texting, instant message, or the web? To do that, you'll want to visit your settings page (and you'll want to invite some friends)."

On the other hand, honesty is displayed in the fact that I (indirectly) arrived at this thread from the help section... But the lies are more prominent.

TwitterIM isn't totally dead. The twitter IM presence still exists and responds with "TwitterIM is under maintenance at the moment. Please check back later."

IM integration with twitter shouldn't be a particularly difficult technical problem. It might be a matter of priority, timing, and concern for feature management. They probably want it to be right, complete, working and not threaten the rest of the twitter-ecosystem if and when they do roll IM out again. Imagine the bitching white noise if they roll it back out and it isn't stable.

The lack of communication seems to be in vogue these days with net-centric companies. I guess I can understand that to a degree. I've told anxious users more than once, "It'll be done when it's done". Sometimes that's better than trying to control the message with guarded statements or being tempted to make unrealistic commitments in an effort to quell fears. Simply let the actual artifact be the message when it arrives. There's a honesty there that is stark and pure ... although a tad unsatisfying as users to be sure. Until I hear otherwise I think Jason's last post says it all and I remain hopeful.

I am using twittd successfully for the time being. It seems quite satisfactory all in all. Not as immediate as the native twitter IM but it does work rather well.

However, if we do discover that TwitterIM isn't going to come back, I intend to write a XMPP transport for twitter (suitable to plug into ejabberd) to satisfy my own selfish twitterIM needs.

It would just be faster if Twitter would buy one of the other services providing a pseudo-IM interface to their own product.

Happy September 1st.

I think we'll never have IM back. At least not before a major rewrite of the codebase. I'm tempted to take this conversation over to fred wilson on twitter AND his blog. When your investor gets harassed it should speed up the end. I'm almost weened off twitter now.

Any idea about when we'll get our IM back?

Haha, "the night" - that would've been awesome! Jack, any idea if this is going to get fixed by the end of 2008? :) – Chris Thomson, on August 27, 2008 00:24

You have to remember with the SMS issue, you aren't paying for the service and it's costing Twitter loads of cash. As for the IM outage - there's no excuse, it should've been fixed faster. :( – Chris Thomson, on August 27, 2008 00:23

If this were my problem to solve I'd look seriously at ejabberd as an IM interface to twitter. Fast, robust, scalable, distributed by design, plugin extension architecture. Perhaps they are... dunno. If they're not maybe it's the powerful but obscure erlang ejabberd is written in that's preventing them.

If you've not tried erlang, you should. It's free of saturated fats and good for the environment! (well... kinda)

Does anyone have insight regarding the solution the twitter crew is stewing for the IM interface brew?

It would be great to see an altered API or better yet, just reinstate twitterIM so that our twitbots can feel useful and get back to work without having to be rewritten.

Help prevent the global twitbot identity crisis epidemic and bring back twitterIM.

Hey, give them a break. They're hunting 'whales' without a harpoon. Twitter appear to be in perpetual 'patch' mode.

It's been said from many users in this forum that Twitter management and employees clearly don't give a rat's ass about notifying their user base that these IM features aren't coming anytime soon. Particular odd that a company based on a notification technology cannot even notify their own customers.

If they are coming, then why hasn't Twitter responded in months (plural)?

No SMS, no IM, no good.

As someone who helps to run an instant messaging server for 25,000 users at a UK University, and runs several bot services on it, I'm baffled that this can't scale easily.

Either they've buried IM entirely but don't want to admit it (hoping perhaps that some other service will come along and then they can abdicate responsibility to it without admitting they abandoned it) or they're trying to hide something. Otherwise, why not have some blog updates from the developers who are said to be working on restoring IM? I know *I* would be interested in what they're doing to try to solve the nearly-4-month-old outage and perpetual unchanging "Offline - working on additional capacity" claim on the status page...

Getting quite cynical about the lack of news on the two features that got me to sign up for Twitter in the first place (IM and Tracking...)

Does any one else find it hilarious that it still says that the company is working on the problem?

We know Twitter isn't working on this. And we know it's a pretty good possibility that they never will.

But until I can find something that will send me IMs as reminders, I'll keep bothering them about fixing it.

i really dont get why its taking so long. I could have learned a computer language and fixed it by now. get on the ball guys! at the very least, keep people updated on what your doing, even if its in geek and most the people wont get what your talking about, its comforting.

The fact that Twitter still doesn't reply to this post about IM, or any other post concering IM, and that their status page only gets updated when they figure out another database problem, should clearly state their position on IM. Really, it's not like letting us know the status somehow helps their competition. I'm sure they're still coding the new IM content.

However, I'm still wondering how they intend to make income on this concept.

Seriously, Twitter. We've been waiting since May....please please please just give us an update. Even you can't fix it, just let us know something.