Don’t get caught in the middle
Twitter’s been having problems over the last couple of days. It’s led Robert Scoble to declare that Twitter has given Friendfeed a major gift. The problems caused Daryl Tay to go off Twitter for a while. And lots of people have been asking questions about what’s going on.
For me, that’s the biggest issue. Yes, it’s not good that Twitter is broken. But the biggest problem is that it’s not obvious that it’s broken. If it’s broken and the site is down and there’s an error page, yes, it’s annoying, but at least people know what they are going to get. When they try to access Twitter, they know it’s down.
But that’s not what happened. The service was accessible. But it didn’t work how it was expected to. Because of that, people were left guessing about what’s going on. And people often don’t bother to take the time to guess.
If you’re going to go down, go down. But don’t leave people hanging. The middle ground is the worst place to be.
At least that’s my opinion. What do you think?