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Look! It's New Twitter, with all sorts of awesome new features that can't walk out the damned door!

Is Twitter making the same mistakes as mySpace?

For those who don't remember, mySpace was the once-popular website that allowed people to become "friends" with bands, celebrities, and occasionally, regular people. It had millions upon millions of users and three times that in accounts. Rupert Murdoch, in a fit of insanity, purchased the thing for hundreds of millions of dollars, and sold it for a stale bagel a year or so ago.

What happened to the site? Lots of things. "Security" became ridiculous and arbitrary, with accounts getting axed without warning or chance of appeal. It became slow, unresponsive, and unusable. But I think the biggest problem was this: new features were constantly added that only made the service more and more unusable.

I smell the same problems with Twitter, especially in regards to the "new feature-itis" disease.

The old adage goes that to a hammer, everything is a nail. To a software programmer, everything needs a new feature. Case in point: new Twitter and all the new features they've been releasing, like pictures in the stream, videos in the stream, and so on.

But if you use Twitter regularly, you know that they do everything they can to reduce use of their bandwidth. Users are limited by hour to how much they can do on Twitter; limited in the number of people users can follow in a day, send direct messages to, etc.

Yet somehow, the folks at Twitter seem to think that inflicting additional bandwidth and clock-cycle requirements on its system through new features (that had nothing to do with its original success) is somehow a good idea.

Dear Twitter: you are breaking yourself. If you want to avoid turning into the next mySpace, quit making new features. Streamline the ones you already have. You were popular because you were fast and streamlined, and now you're turning into a fat slob. Quit turning away your audience with limitations, bugs, and slow response times.

But what do I know? I'm just a user who's finding your service turning into a pile of unusable slow goo.

contact ladd @ filmladd dot com