Tag: ping

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What’s [Not] Up With Twitter Today?

twitter fail for monday july 7, 2008

My Twitter usage has ramped up consistently since I first registered in late 2006. But now, one of the most exciting adventures about it is this: in what ways will Twitter fail today? For the past three months, Twitter users have grown accustomed to daily instances of “stress,” “overload,” faulty API limits exceeded, and random appearances of the now infamous fail whale. Many have forecast the demise of Twitter as if it is reminiscent of the second Web bubble itself and even while the weekend bitchmeme virtually handed the king-of-all-internets crown from Twitter to Friendfeed over the weekend, it’s just not so. Twitter isn’t going away and neither are it’s users. And that’s after many weeks of people like me wondering why and how we still manage to put up with a service that reminds us on a regular basis that we really don’t (or rather, can’t) depend on addictive web 2.0 tools wholly and exclusively. Perhaps it’s that reminder that we appreciate the most.

This morning’s Twitter fail is: I saw nothing at http://twitter.com/home until a few refreshes delivered Andrew Mager‘s latest tweet as distributed via ping.fm. Twhirl is experiencing API limit exceeded after only a few minutes operation which is indubitably bogus. The sharp, new Tweetdeck even quit delivering new tweets 20 minutes ago.

Could this be the long-awaited rebirth of Twitter as stable application day? We can only hope so.

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Is Ping.fm a Lame Data-Mining Op? Or is it Just Annoying?

go away pingfmSomeone seriously has to cut the noise around here. I signed up for the Ping.fm Beta because, well, I love signing up for betas for no particular reason.

Right off the bat I knew this service was totally pointless. Why would I want to post the same message to 5 or 6 different social networks at the same time? So my friends that are also on one, two or six of the same networks hear me like a broken record? I knew it was dumb, but thinking that — just maybe — someday it could be useful, I signed up, with no intention to actually use it (I’ve done similar thing with Digg, Yelp, GrandCentral and more — signing up early and not really using until I trusted the service.

ping.fm is a scam
ping.fm is a scam

It hasn’t been an hour, though, and I am trying to close my Ping.fm account, but there is no apparent way to opt-out once you sign up (though I did change my account e-mail to no@than.ks). Unfortunately, it’s already too late — they immediately spammed my Pownce and Twitter account with the messages above. THEN, I read their Terms of Service (I know, I shoulda known better) and realized that this was the operation of two kids who likely were more interested in purging people’s data from multiple social websites than actually providing a useful service.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with throwing myself out on the Internet in all transparency and am fully aware of the risks therein. But I hate to see myself and my friends get not only spammed (by each other) but also punked by signing up for a seemingly legitimate service (see Mashable‘s review today). Before we get into the small print, let’s just look at the “company” behind Ping.fm.

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