As far as it being free, that argument really means nothing when you look at other free services on the internet such as Flickr, anything by Google and pretty much every other free service out there. They are free services but are stable and reliable and have many times more users than Twitter. If they had the reliability of Twitter, nobody would use services like Flickr, Gmail or Google Maps.

The are two reasons that Twitter has no ads at this point. One, they have yet to find a good way to monetize it without alienating the users, probably because they spend all their time trying to keep the site up. Second, the model that much of the web 2.0 world seems to have adopted is that first you should get your user base and the revenue model will follow. Having just received $15 million in venture capital, they appear to be in no hurry to find a revenue model.

Their “General Conditions” section of their Terms of Service basically says “Use at Your Own Risk.”

I agree with your conclusion though. If it doesn’t fill your needs/expectations, take your business elsewhere. I have been checking out Plurk lately. Twitter still gets most of my attention though.