The demise of Twitter: from push to passive

When Twitter first came in to "my net life" it I was annoyed yet attracted to it's in-your-face constant alerting of social updates. The instant info burst of where funkycoda was going for lunch or DmitryBaranovsk's request for a timely response for a solution to a JavaScript problem or lachlanhardy alerting followers to the release of another new social network where all great uses of the interruption technology which came to me via an instant message (when on my desktop) or an SMS (when on out-and-about or the road).

For now, I am resigned to reading "tweet" history on the Twitter website. Reading over such social comments after-the-fact makes me feel like I missed out. Commenting later is not much good to anyone seeking an instant response. The "he's doing it now" nature of the service often made me also want to contribute then and there using the same technology of receival to comment back.

For a while, things have changed: IM stability for Twitter was a hit and miss affair earlier this year and it seems to have been taken down (permanently) for months now. So for a long time now I have not been making regular updates as I have not had an easy way to make them. Now also with the death of SMS alerts in Australia I am again disconnected from the JIT nature of the service and for me, apart from friend connections on the service I have lost use of the here and now aspect of it. There are many other services that allow me to "micro blog" that do it much better and are usable (brightkite being my current favourite).

NOTE: I know there is twitteriffic out there but I have not used it as I am against the fact that I need to provide my login credentials to a third party and run a dedicated app in place of something that fitted seamlessly with my existing day-to-day applications. Twitter should offer a service like this themselves or provide a google/flicker open auth ID type solution so a 3rd party does not see my personal login.