Taking some time off on Twitter

In case you follow me on Twitter you know I have been posting there more and more over the past months. It’s a great tool to always keep in touch with real-life friends, people with similar interests and fellow entrepreneurs. I shared most of my life on Twitter, and got a lot back as a result as well. Try it for yourself, hard to explain in a blog post – but the social Internet basically works because the more you give the more you get. The same as with traffic on your site: the more you send people away the more they will come back. But I digress.

But I have always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Twitter because of its frequent outages. There were times when the service was more often not working than that it was up. But it seems people like the service so much that they take that for granted. The problem is that there is simply no alternative, because the whole audience is on Twitter and you cannot just transfer that to Pownce or Jaiku. But honestly, I am a bit fed up with it now.

Early on Saturday morning (China time) I realized that I was not getting updates from people that I was following. I un-followed and re-followed them, and that did the trick – but only for about 1 hour. Then they were gone again. And the thing is that they also could not see my updates. Right now I have over 370 followers on Twitter, but I have no clue who I will reach with my messages and who I will not reach. A bit like sending a mass email, but not knowing who is able to receive it. And the other way around: others are broadcasting messages that might be interesting for me to see, but they don’t show up in my time line.

It’s now Monday night and the folks at Twitter still did not manage to solve the problem. Therefore I have decided to stop posting on Twitter until this issue is solved. It’s also a good way to test whether I am addicted to Twitter or not (I don’t think so, it’s just fun to get instant feedback on things you are doing). In the meantime I might post some messages on my Pownce account or on Facebook instead. Or I might just go back to the good old days before micro blogging, when I just had this weblog.