Twitter service delays and problems

In May-June last year, there was noise in the Twitter and developer communities about delays and unreliable service from the popular microblogging platform. Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror suggested Twitter was a victim of its own success. Twitter fought back, working hard to deal with the service issues that its meteoric rise had brought. A year on, and the same or similar issues are bubbling up. Who or what was to blame: the management? the developers? Ruby on Rails?

Tim Bray suggested that, maybe, it's not the platform, it's the people. He may have a point: Twitter *is* attention hungry. Ravenous. And I would claim there are hard-wired cognitive limits to our ability to multitask -- at least, without seriously impaired task performance. For educators, this is a key issue. Past a certain point, intensive Twitter use should be read as primarily about maintaining social presence, not about information exchange. I take the point about the Twitteresque benefits of "early-warning systems" and Twitter's enabling of "distributed cognition", but I'd be very surprised if those affordances counted for anything more than an exceptionally small fragment of Twitter usage, day to day. There is always a tradeoff point where the attention cost that accompanies intensity of use negates the initial benefits of adoption. How many users have reached that point?

Twittterers seeking to prune their usage might like to check out Seth Godin's Email Checklist for suggestions. No, Seth's list wasn't written in relation to microblogging, and some of the points are not relevant, but it might make you think about the ways in which your time and attention is currently distributed across services and systems.