Twittered Out? (a geeky rant)

OK, consider me a convert. Ever since Brad introduced me to Twitter a few months back, I've grown increasingly enamored with it. First it was just a nifty gadget. Then I started to think about the strategic applications of the tool.

Like marking a community people who self-identify as interested in a given topic. Or building a "breaking news" feed in a crisis situation. Or engaging that community to drive traffic to a blog or website. Or engaging opinion leaders quickly and directly. Or establishing yourself as a resource on a given topic.

So I started to tinker.

I found prominent bloggers who also use twitter and I built text clouds of their collective blog posts and collective tweets to see if they use the tools differently. (They did.)

I built a news aggregator for Super Tuesday, and it got some attention.

Now I'm building accounts that follow people and news feeds in a specific field, identifying discussions from selected thought leaders and matching them up with the clients that care about it.

And it's all great. Twitter is getting a lot of attention, and it's well deserved.

Until it doesn't work.

Twitter's had a lot of fits and starts lately, as many of the social media marketing glitterati have reported. I've had a lot of trouble logging in, reading updates, sending tweets, and so on. It's been incredibly frustrating, and I'm looking at other tools to get what I need. I want to be a power user of this tool, but it's not giving me what I need.

I even considered dusting off the Pownce account (remember that week when Pownce was the biggest thing EVAH?) and I started poking around to see who was there. A lot of the people I follow on Twitter are on Pownce and Jaiku. I like Twitter's ease of use, but I'll use whatever I need to get the job done.

Please guys, fix the bugs and bring the tool back. I can guarantee you it's easier to get venture capital when your tool works.