The past week has seen atrocious performance from Twitter, and cute as it is, I for one have seen this screen message far too often for my tastes.

Given how hard it has been lately to get out 140 characters of text, a seemingly simple, low IT overhead task, my love for our much maligned old friend e-mail has grown, and I have been driven to Facebook, Flickr, Brightkite and elsewhere in my attempts to stay connected.

To remind myself of why Twitter is so great, and why we have declared the death of e-mail, I jotted down the differences between the two.

Twitter

• Limited to 140 characters
• Unformatted ASCII only with some special characters
• Text and URLs only
• Adding single recipients somewhat “automated;” multiple recipients must be manually entered
• Few sending options — reply and single recipient direct message

E-mail

• No character limit
• Most clients support full text formatting, styles, fonts, colors, alignment, bulleted lists, etc.
• Text, URLs, images, attachments
• All recipients may be automated from address book
• Numerous sending options (reply, reply to all, cc, Bcc, forward)

Now factor how unreliable Twitter has become, and you have to wonder, “why you got to be hating on e-mail so much?” Of course I am being a bit facetious. A direct comparison of the two is unfair and not all that useful. But you do have to question what happens to the appeal of Twitter when its operation becomes so difficult and unpredictable. The Twitter metaphor only works if the tool is available 99.999 per cent of the time.

Tags: twitter, poor performance, email, comparison