Twitter Clones – Deja Vu All Over Again

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.

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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
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. 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 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?