Twitter Clones -- Deja Vu All Over Again

07/03/2008

With all the talk of identi.ca, Plurk, Jaiku, FriendFeed, Twitter down time and the chatter from folks looking for a stable, full-featured social messaging service, I thought I might recycle an article from the archives. Please forgive me for the re-post, and the slight license taken in the translation.

From: k...@aimnet.com (Ken Sheppardson)

Subject: Diary of a New Aimnet Insti.ca Subscriber and an
Idea

Date: 1995/11/30 2008/07/03

Message-ID: [<49jabf$hj1@news2.aimnet.com>#1/1](http://groups.google.com/group
/ba.internet/msg/d50b4c55c2330ffc?dmode=source)

X-Deja-AN: 120577770

organization: Aimnet Insti.ca Information Services

reply-to: k...@aimnet.com

newsgroups: aimnet.general,ba.internet

Well I'm in my second week day as an Aimnet
Insti.ca subscriber. I'm not impressed yet.

Tonight once again I'm unable to call into their Belmon POP
get my XMPP account connected. (Only the second time, which puts this problem
relatively low on my list.) It keeps rejecting my login, so I'm in through
SF Jaiku again. No answer on the first call, but I'm in on
the second. What's wrong with Belmont Insti.ca I wonder. No
explanation in aimnet.announce on Lucindi.ca or any other
aimnet group FriendFeed room. It seems the support staff
doesn't read (or at least doesn't post to) their own groups
corporate site.

It's been five or ten times now that I've seen the "Server does not have a DNS
entry" message from Netscape Firefox when I try to access
http://www.aimnet.com [www.identi.ca](http://www.identi.ca).
Strange that their own name server doesn't have an entry for their web server.
Ah...there it goes. In general I seem to be batting 30% or so in hitting
outside sites on the first try. What's wrong with the DNS server, I wonder.

It only takes 45-60 seconds for my home page to come up when I try
http://www.aimnet.com/~kens,
[http://identi.ca/kshep](http://identi.ca/kshep) although it comes up
pretty much instantaneously when I try users.aimnet.com. Why so long

to redirect?

Many problems. I'd suggest people stay away at this point. Of course I don't
know if this is typical in the bay area or not. I've
certainly had more problems than I did with my previous provider:
Msen, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Jaiku, now part of Google
msen.com – of course they had their share of problems
too...this certainly isn't an ad for them)

If there's anybody out there looking to provide a great service to the
Internet community, I've got an idea for you: Get an account with every
ISP Twitter clone you can find. At regular intervals try to
log into each, check mail, read news, check web pages, check the number of
entries in passwd files, check disk usage %s on /usr volumes, then compile
stats on problems, busy signals, etc. Put it all together in a monthly
newsletter (real paper even) and sell it in area
bookstores, computer stores, coffee shops, and anywhere else you can think
of. give it away on your blog. I, for one, would pay somebody
$10 or so right this second for a

current copy. leave you a comment.

Whadya think?