Developers Give Twitter the Boot

I gotta be honest. For the past couple weeks I’ve been using Plurk a ton. The initial reason was downtime from Twitter but it increasingly became about the much more active community. Then today I read about developers bailing on Twitter because of their unreliable API. That’s a big problem but then again not even Plurk has a functioning API.

The reality is that developing a micro-blogging platform is a lot more difficult then anyone anticipated as far as I can tell. Twitter has throttled API access, making it extremely difficult for any developer to build a reliable application on top of the service. A couple months ago, I launched an internal directory for this site but the Twitter API slowed down the service significantly.

While I’ve since figured out a workaround (which has yet to be implemented), having to develop a workaround due to an unreliable API just doesn’t seem like the right solution. Some seem to think that Twitter is going to die thanks to their failing API. While I’ve been using the service less frequently, many of my contacts are still using the service regularly to stay updated with what’s going on in the digital community.

Many more are confused with which service to use and have instead decided to use all of them by taking advantage of the Ping.fm service which updates your status across all your networks. Whatever the solution is, something has to give in the world of status updates and micro-blogging in general. For some reason I seriously doubt that this will mean the death of Twitter. Have you started using other services as well or are you still a faithful Twitter user?