by Michelle Lentz
You can shut the book on Twitter’s IM support. If, like me, you were a big fan of interacting with Twitter through your GTalk or AIM account, well, that’s for another day. According to a Twitter Status blog post on Friday, the feature has officially been moved from the “Things That Are Broken” pile, er, list to the the “Things We Want to Build” list.
Basically, they’ve put it on the back of the backburner for now, while they deal with various items on the Broken list and the more useful and/or fun things on the Build list. The point being that when they do bring it back, it will be built from scratch and not held together with a fail whale band-aid.
You have to really credit them for the honesty. Twitter is definitely getting better about transparency:
The fact is, our infrastructure for IM was never ready for prime time. Like a lot of things, it was built rapidly when we were small and had to be completely re-thought in order to support a much bigger user base. Since we were (famously) having trouble keeping up with that demand in the core service, IM, which was used by a minority of users, always got the shaft.
I also appreciate that Evan Williams takes the time to point out that this is something that can be built by a third-party using Twitter’s API and in fact, that excla.im has done just that, and there may be more. In every microblogging presentation I give, I stress that one of Twitter’s strengths is actually the third-party apps. Perhaps that applies to using Twitter in IM as well.
–
Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology. You can also catch Michelle presenting on Twitter at the upcoming DevLearn ’08 in San Jose.