Back in June, when we first noted the Twitter status chart on the Twitter Status blog, IM functionality was highlighted with red, a signal that the feature was completely not working. Nearly four months later, Twitter announced yesterday that the XMPP functionality that enabled Twitter users to receive and send updates via instant messaging is not only still not working, but also isn't forecasted to be working again at any point in the near future. IM functionality is no longer shown on the status chart at all.
In an update on the status blog, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams states that the feature has been
"moved...from our Things That are Broken list to our Things We Want to Build list. Based on our analysis, the cost-to-benefit for IM for the most users is not as high as some other things—so it will be a while before we tackle it."
Williams also takes the opportunity to highlight Twitter's recently more stable uptime. While admitting that the infrastructure was "not ready for primetime," Williams doesn't answer the question of whether the uptime is due to a decreased load on the system. I can't be the only Twitter user who uses the service far less without the ease and immediacy of XMPP functionality; I simply don't keep up with the messages as I used to. As a result, I've actually stopped following new people on Twitter simply because I so rarely check the updates, even though I run a desktop client for it.
Looking at the stats of two former high-end users of the service indicates the same drop-off in use. Both Robert Scoble of FastCompany.tv and Jason Calacanis of Mahalo seem to have reduced the number of messages sent, according to Twitter stats service TweetStats. Some of that may be due to the uptake in the early adopter set of other social media sites like FriendFeed that became popular during Twitter's frequent outages. But perhaps placing XMPP on the backburner is less about allocating developer resources and more about keeping the service up and running.
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