Normally I am fast asleep at the time that I am writing this, but it is quite warm here and I can't sleep when it is hot.  Not being able to sleep, I decided to browse the new posts on my Google Reader.  After sifting through all of the stuff I don't care about, I came across some news from TechCrunch that Twitter is removing a large part of the service's @ reply functionality because it seems to believe people are too stupid to figure it out.  Maybe I am just cranky because I can't sleep, but this sounds like a great opportunity to go on a good rant.

Is there anything about Twitter that confuses you to the point of frustration or even wanting to quit the service?  Do you find @ replies confusing?  I didn't think so.  @ Replies have been around for nearly as long as Twitter yet apparently all of the sudden they are too confusing for people.  What is most perplexing is that this functionality that is being removed, the ability to see everybody's @ replies even if you don't follow the people they are talking to, is that this functionality isn't even enabled by default.  You have to go into the settings and enable this feature yourself.  If people are too stupid to figure out the basics of twitter, what are they doing mucking around in the settings area in the first place?  If people can't figure out what this functionality does and how it affects their experience withe the service, I think that is more twitter's fault for not explaining it well enough instead of just implying that their users are stupid.

The truly annoying thing about all of this is that they seem to be eliminating one feature after another without adding anything.  Just recently, they announced that they were killing the auto-follow feature that a user has to request to be an option in the first place.  Why are you killing a feature that is obviously valuable to some people while most users don't know it exists so that it can't change how they use the service?  I am not completely against killing features as I understand that sometimes they aren't useful or cause more problems than good, but killing used features for no reason and not replacing them with new functionality is something that has always irritated me.  It is the purpose of a service to move forward, not back.  While many services are adding features, the fastest growing service on the internet seems to be taking them away with no legitimate reason for doing so.

Twitter seems to be becoming too reliant upon third party services to fill in the gap.  I will admit that while there are some really stupid services out there, there are a ton of great twitter apps and services that bring a huge value to the twitter experience.  While I think it is great to let the twitter community grow and do its own thing, it is not right to expect them to pick up the slack and make new services just because you kill off an existing feature.  You can help the community grow in many ways, but lowering the value of your service by disabling features is not a good move for anybody.  Twitter needs to wake up and realize that it has a ton of competition from services such as friendfeed and needs to spend more time improving and stabilizing the product instead of moving backward and disabling existing functionality.

Enough of my late night rant.  If you haven't already, give a listen to episode #23 of the Global Geek News Podcast.  A new show should be out Thursday or Friday.  Until then...

Follow me on twitter & friendfeed!

-Jeremy "pcnerd37" Bray

As I'm sure many of you tech blog lovers have heard, Time Warner Cable is starting a test of metered bandwidth this week in Beaumont, Texas.  At the low end, users will pay $29.95 per month for service at a speed of 768 kilobits per second, with a 5GB monthly cap. At the high end, users will pay $54.90 per month for service at 15 megabits per second, with a 40GB cap.  For every GB used above these limits, the customer will be charged $1.  Before I tear this story apart, here are the rest of the details:  Time Warner Cable has 90,000 customers in the trial area, but the test pricing structure will affect only new subscribers. The gigabyte surcharges go into effect after the first two months of service.

Now that the very ugly details are out of the way, its time I rant about this idea which is one of the worst ones I have heard since I have been using the internet.

Considering the time of streaming video, VoIP, P2P, podcasts and other bandwidth intensive processes that we are in, there is becoming a strain on some providers to allow these services while still providing a decent experience for all its customers.  While I sympathize with this idea to an extent (I know there is a ton of dark fiber out there!), I believe this is the opposite of the ideal solution for this problem.

While I don't like Comcast's proposed limit of 250GB/mo, It is a far more reasonable limit than  5GB or 40GB per month.  If you are like many people and watch many shows online from services like Hulu or download high definition shows from Xbox Live, it doesn't take but a matter of minutes to use up a single GB of bandwidth.  Depending on the speed of your connection, it is easy to have over a GB of data is less than an hour.  If you downloaded large files on a regular basis, this adds up very quickly.  I have been known to download over 25GB in a single day!  If I was on Time Warner Cable and did this, I would be paying hundreds of dollars a month for my internet connection.  This is rediculous!

While I will admit to being a heavy internet user, setting such a low limit can be very problematic for even  the most casual of users.  For people that like to send vacation pictures or funny videos over the email, it wont be difficult to bump up against this limit.  Any sort of medium to large size files will put people up against this limit very easily.  If you download any kinds of podcasts or anything that has large files on a regular basis, this could get very expensive easily.  I typically download several GB worth of podcasts a day.

This could be the fastest possible way for Time Warner Cable to lose customers.  The service is far too expensive for such a little limit when you compare it to other providers such as Comcast or Verizon.  When customers see their bills that will likely end up being hundreds of dollars, they will likely become enraged and have the service disconnected immediately.  I know I would!  Considering the current state of the economy, the last thing we need is for the cost of one of life's most essential services to skyrocket.

While for now this only affects new customers, this will change and I guarantee lead to a massive exodus of Time Warner Cable customers to other services such as Comcast or Verizon.

I firmly believe this is the worst possible idea that Time Warner Cable could have come up with and not only could they end up self destructing because of it, but it could potentially cause substantial damage to the already ailing economy.

If Time Warner Cable wishes to shoot themselves in the foot, I wish them all the luck in the world and hope this causes them to bleed to death.  There is no room in the internet provider market for such stupidity and I believe that unless they throw this idea out the window, they will cease to exist in the coming years as they will have priced themselves out of business.

-Jeremy "pcnerd37" Bray