If you are a Twitter user then you’re probably frustrated with the service thesedays and fed up with seeing the Fail Whale page that tells you that there’s just “too many tweets”. The API requests has also been lowered from the standard 70 per hour to just 20 which means if you’re using a desktop Twitter client like Twitterrific then you are buggered unless you lower the auto refresh from every 3 minutes to every 15 minutes to avoid the dreaded yellow triangle.

The official Twitter Status page often seems a bit casual as if they are shrugging and saying “So the site is down again, so what?”. Nothing much seems to change - goes from running fine then oops, everything has gone pear shaped again. Personally I prefer the Fake Twitter Status. It’s given me a good laugh this afternoon, especially this more recent one at the time of writing…

You’re totally going to laugh about this one.  Somebody tripped over the power cable in our new offices and through some kind of “Butterfly Effect” kind of thing, the entire website went down.  Go figure.

I’m looking forward to the day when the official Twitter status page is as open and as frank as the fake one!

It seems like every week I’m discovering new social sites and signing up to them to give them a trial run as I’m always up for trying new things so I can give my opinion (yes, I’ve tried Facebore. Verdict: Zzzzzz) Yesterday it was the turn of Plurk which is a micro-blogging site where you give short 140 character updates.

The site design is nice - bright and fun looking, although I think the “share your emo-ness” is a bit lame and I did wonder if this was going to be aimed towards the 12-16y/misery-teenage-types. The timeline is a bit weird to keep on top of. When I log onto the site a little message comes up to say there’s XX updates…and I never catch up or read what’s been posted as there’s often a lot going on. If there was a Plurk desktop client for Mac then that may make life easier to keep on top of things. I’m not keen on the Karma rating - that’s not something that interests me at all and to be honest I can only see that encouraging people to post for the sake of posting, so they reach new levels and get more emoticons.

Anyway, I’ll be looking in on it every now and again to witness it’s growth - feel free to Plurk me.

Thesedays there doesn’t seem to be a week that goes by without some new social network site being launched with an invite only while in private beta. One I’ve been hearing whispered around the web for a week or two is Brightkite.

For some weeks I’ve heard rumbles in the Twittersphere about Socialthing! Anything that is private beta always gets my curiosity. Thanks to Jon I got an invite to try it out. Here’s an explanation of what it’s all about, from the Socialthing! website…

See everything that’s going on with your friends in all the sites you use, easily figure out where you’re missing connections with your friends, interact with multiple sites at once, and more!

Socialthing! makes it easy to see all the things your friends are doing. It’s a news feed for every site that you use in one place.

It’s a place to see “what’s up” in your digital life, and figure out where to go to from there…

The services you can currently add to your Lifestream in Socialthing! are Facebook, Flickr, Pownce, Twitter, Vimeo and Livejournal. I’m sure more services will be added in time. I had initially set my Socialthing! Lifestream page as my homepage in Camino so I could quickly catch up with all the services I use in one fell swoop at the start of my day. However, it seems that after a while it forgets that I have logged in and requested to be kept signed in, so it’s a little annoying to have to log-in each time. Hopefully that’s something that can be ironed out, even if it is indeed a bug.

I have got 2 invites 1 invites 0 invites left for Socialthing! if you’d like one. The first two people to comment on this entry will get an invite.

After the poor customer service I experienced with 1&1 Internet recently, it’s easy to focus on negatives where large companies are concerned, especially the big ones who lean on the little folk. Negatives do get more publicity on blogs, clearly, but it’s nice to praise the good ones aswell, from time to time. I know from experience that this kind of positive entry can prove helpful to others who have stumbled upon it. So, I’m going to be nice and do a little praising in this entry.

A few days ago I went to Harrods.com to browse their Molton Brown Bath and Shower range. I was looking for Blissful Templetree Shower Gel on the MB range page, but it wasn’t listed. I fired off a quick e-mail to Harrods at around 5.30pm to ask if they would be getting any in stock soon. I wasn’t expecting a prompt reply or even one that evening considering the time of day. However, moments later the Harrods Beauty Concierge e-mailed me with the relevant info and link to the item I wanted to buy. I also enquired about Warming Eucalyptus Shower Gel (one of my absolute faves) but he said although it wasn’t in stock on the site, the store had it in and I could call him directly to place an order for that if I wished. Since I was using PayPal as my payment method I just bought the one in stock on the site. With postage the item came to £20.49 which I think is even less than it costs at the Molton Brown website. Very pleasurable shopping experience. Always nice to get fast, friendly and personal assistance via e-mail, especially when I was least expecting it!

Another thumbs up for an online company. o2 Broadband. You can search Fruit Bytes for those terms and see lots of glowing reports from me since I’ve had nothing but good experience with them. And yeah, it might be getting boring but when the service is above and beyond what I even expect then it’s nice to say so. And ‘o2 Broadband’ is the term most commonly used to bring people here I noticed in my stats recently. Yesterday I received an e-mail from them…

Dear Samantha,

To ensure that your O2 Broadband always performs at the highest level, we occasionally have to carry out essential maintenance.

That’s why we’re writing to you to let you know that for a brief period this weekend, you may experience the odd interruption to your broadband service.

Work will begin at approximately midnight on Friday 22 February and continue until 8am on Sunday 24 February.

We apologise for the inconvenience, and we’ll do everything we can to keep the disruption to a minimum.

Best regards

o2 Broadband Team

I was pleasantly surprised. In all the years I’ve had the internet I have never had an e-mail from my broadband provider forewarning of possible disruptions. If there was planned maintenance then I, the paying customer, would be the last person to be informed. If I wanted to find out if there were any issues I’d have to call the service status line which most of the time would be way outdated anyway. So, I’d have my call passed to a customer services agent who would take me through reformatting my machine before revealing that it’s a known issue! Gaaah! Incidentally, there has been absolutely no disruption to my o2 Broadband service so far this weekend. But even if there had then they’d totally be forgiven!

One last mention for an online company who deliver the goods, just to make this my top 3 of 2008! Invision Power Services - Probably THE fastest support via e-mail…ever! I have been an Invision Power Board client for a number of years and around 6-8 weeks ago I had been making some changes to my forums. I had a couple of queries before I proceeded with these changes as I’m absolutely no PHP whizz, so I sent a support ticket in at 20.21 and received a reply at 20.23 which answered everything and more. They are super fast and friendly. If there are changes to be made to files that I am uncomfortable about amending then they will do it for me. 10/10!

Oooh, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to know I’m a valued client.