Getting Started

So I started a Twitter account.  Signing-up was not without its problems.  The sign-up form has some AJAX functionality for checking whether a user name is in use or not.  Except that functionality is just absent in Opera, and it turns out that in Twitterland I am not the only person called Dan Dyer.  There is not even an error message when the registration fails.  You just get returned to the sign-up form.  Very annoying.  It wasn’t until I tried it in Safari that I figured out what was happening.  You are also limited to a 15-character username, so I could not register as “newadventuresinsoftware”.

That initial hurdle overcome, I proceded to post my first “tweet”, a link back to the blog post announcing this little adventure.  The translation of the URL to a Tiny URL tripped over the brackets that I used to surround the link and messed up my tweet.  Lesson learned for next time.

The use of these shrunk and obfuscated URLs is necessitated by the strict 140 character limit.  It’s not done very cleverly though.  I tried to post a tweet that would be 140 characters after the link had been shrunk, but the Twitter website would not permit this.

In all, the Twitter website is pants.  It’s a bad way to post messages and a bad way to follow other people.  If it were the only way to interact with the service I would have aborted my trial already.  Most of the Twitter pros are using some kind of desktop or mobile client.  I’ve tried using the Opera widget and that’s an improvement.  Next step is to settle on one of the more full-featured desktop clients.

Technical Problems

Twitter’s technical issues are legendary. I hadn’t heard much about them recently, so I assumed things had got better. But I’m only a few hours in and I’ve already experienced my first brief outage:

Day One Summary

As well as getting signed-up and posting my first tweets, I’ve also attracted my first disciples followers (thanks).  I don’t really know who are the best people to follow, so as well as the few people I have picked out, I’m following everybody who follows me.  That raises a question though: if I’m following you, and you’re following me, are we both lost?

At the moment I’m underwhelmed by the whole experience, but I didn’t expect to achieve enlightenment on day one.  I’m just doing the ground work for the epiphany that will surely occur at some point in the next 2 weeks.  Right now I’m just sitting back waiting for the magic to happen.