Twitter IM Status

Hmmm. I don't see it. I'm at http://twitter.com/home, and under my "Currently" I see a link to set up IM, nothing about it not being available. When you go to the devices page http://m.twitter.com/devices It says nothing about IM being down. There are instructions on how to set it up.
Again, if there is a problem, fine. BUT let us know there is a problem. There's no excuse for the lack of information on the set up page. That's careless and thoughtless. Free service or not.

It's said that for about a month now. Don't hold your breath on it coming back.

I hope I'm wrong. But I really don't think so.

The sidebar of the Twitter Status page now displays current status information about individual Twitter components under the heading Status per Feature.

The colours indicate

Green = All systems OK
Orange = Not in full working order
Red = Offline

If the mouse is moved over the coloured bar, slightly more detailed information shows up,

e.g. IM: Offline. Working on additional capacity.

Twitter appear to have been testing IM earlier this week, when mdy mentioned receiving some IM messages, though it was still not possible to send. So Twitter are definitely working on a new implementation of IM.

How much longer? Seriously. It's been months.

I sent in an actual help request.

They said to check the status blog.

I don't think IM is coming back.

You have to wonder if they aren't capable of correcting the problem, or simply don't care about it. Most disappointing.

I guess only time will tell whether or not IM will be back.

But until they come right out and say they're dropping that feature, it's my belief that they intend to restore it.

They've said many times that it is the priority feature to restore. They've also said in another thread that it's taking longer than expected to restore because they're having to make a number of technology changes. It's my guess that they're re-writing or re-architecting parts of it using new technology because the original architecture can't scale up to handle the volume.

hmm yeah I was wondering why IM wasn't working, since in my settings IM was still setup, but when i tried to redo it it disappeared (which I now know was intended since it's been disabled)

I guess we have to use twitterific type apps in the meantime although I too did post more Tweets back when I could use IM to do it, fingers crossed they can bring it back (although twitter IS free so I guess we can't whinge too much!)

Clearly they are rewriting the whole thing from scratch... But who knows why it's taking so damn long... Check out this blog post about the original implementation of Twitter's IM interface, no wonder it didn't scale!

http://romeda.org/blog/2006/11/announ...

You know, it's not really GTalk / IM / whatever that I want back; I just want a proper API that I don't have to poll! The great thing about IM was updates came straight through using XMPP. Without it, a number of useful bots and services like TwitterSync (for facebook) just don't work any more.

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?

I'd like to 2nd akent (above): 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.

Is the IM coming back? Any word at all??