evilrouters.net

Several weeks ago, Chris at IIS Hacks posted a rant entitled “What Ruined the Internet?”. I just came across it and am linking to it just because of the awesome intro paragraph that took me on a quick trip down memory lane:

“I’ve been around the Internet since long before the “Dot-Com Bubble”, when we had to get our MP3s from IRC and use Blade’s Encoder for the command line. Slashdot was just starting up, ICQ was the only instant messenger around, and Winamp really did whip the Llama’s ass. Those were the days…or were they?”

I don’t necessarily agree with the rest of his rant, but he got one thing right: Those really were the days…

I’m real tempted to ditch Twitter.

I interact with Twitter in three ways:

• through their web site
• through SMS
• through ping.fm

Most of my interaction with Twitter is through SMS. Nearly all of the updates that I receive from Twitter are via SMS. I “follow” a number of people (74, as I write this) but receive updates via SMS for perhaps only a third of those. I started out having everyone’s updates sent to me via SMS, but some people either 1) post way too frequently and end up annoying the shit out of me or 2) just don’t say enough interesting things (e.g., the “signal-to-noise” ratio is way outta control).

Most (but not all) of my updates are done through ping.fm. My BlackBerry has an AIM client and that’s how I communicate with ping.fm. I send updates to “pingfm” on AIM and those are broadcasted out to Facebook, Pownce (which I hardly ever use), and Twitter. This is nice because I can update Twitter and Facebook at the same time. Because I don’t want every update going to Facebook (e.g. “@ replies”), I usually send those back to Twitter as an SMS.

Last, if I’m at home and on the computer I usually keep Twitter open in a tab and occasionally refresh it, just to keep up on everyone that I don’t receive SMS updates for.

When I first signed up for Twitter, my primary method of interacting with it was via IM. The “track” feature was awesome and allowed me to find others who had similar interests as mine. Once the shit hit the fan with regard to IM (in other words, when it became massively unreliable), they pulled support for it. Suckage.

Then, several months ago, the Twitter service as a whole became extremely unreliable for a good period. A number of folks jumped ship then. I almost did, but I stuck around.

Today, I read on the Twitter blog that they pulled support for receiving SMS updates in Canada (due to rising costs). Since Twitter has no apparent business model (and, it seems, isn’t generating any revenue), it makes sense to assume that eventually the cash supply will be running low. At some point, they’ll pull support for SMS updates in the U.S. as well, at which time I’ll really have no use for the service anymore.

Maybe I should just get out now.

Are there any viable alternatives? It’d be nice to be able to send and receive updates via SMS. I’d be content with receiving updates via SMS and sending updates through another method (e.g. ping.fm, web only, etc.). What are my choices?

a young lady named kate perry has a hit song called “i kissed a girl” that my girlfriend loves. the video for it is okay, but someone came up with a “remix” video that is ten times better (maybe more). don’t believe me? watch for yourself (warning: probably nsfw):

if you need a beta code for ping.fm, use “pingofpings”. it worked for me a few minutes ago.

what is ping.fm?

ping.fm was created for the sole purpose of making it as easy as possible to share your posts with the world. now you don’t have to fumble around the web in order to post anymore, you can just post once, and be done with it.

the idea came about when making some posts to twitter and tumblr . the idea of posting the exact same information in two places seemed a bit tedious, so ping.fm was born.