Twitter; The service known for being wildly popular and highly unstable has been all the rage in the blogosphere and with technophiles. Yet it’s flimsy infrastructure can’t handle the stress of it’s popularity. AOL is about to release the new version of AIM. I was given a preview of the new functionality by Gregory Cypes, Lead Engineer for OpenAIM, on his laptop here at GSPEast and was told it would be public in the next 15 minutes.
Now you have the ability to hook in to your various social networks and applications from your AIM client. The Pulse2 team and myself have all used AIM as our main chat client for years. Before there was twitter we were updating out status as Away messages. Everything that Twitter has tried to be we recognized the functionality in AIM from years before. Now with the new AIM we have the ability to update all of your status on all of your various social networks via your single aim client.
So my question to Twitter is why continue to stumble forward with your flimsy infrastructure and just team up with AIM? AIM has been around for over a decade and they’re already doing what you are. The cool factor fades fast for a service that can’t work reliably… especially in light of a possible competitor.
To be fair- Yesterday Twitter was able to stay up during WWDC for a majority of the time and before such an event would have obliterated the service for hours. Yet the point still remains that Twitter has an uphill battle to develop a solid service, where as AIM has the technology and the means to do it better, faster, and with a much larger existing userbase. In many ways, they already are. Twitter should take notice.