I’m Sick and Tired of Twitter Being Sick and Tired

If you're a regular user of Twitter you've noticed a few disturbing things:

1. It's starting to crash…A LOT. Now, this isn't necessarily a death nail…Twitter attributes many of the crashes to simply an overload of users. If they can (soon!) solve this problem, it might not turn into something that causes people to leave. (We've seen this before with eBay and every fantasy football site.)
2. Spam…and not the delicious, meaty kind. There’s no advertising on Twitter? Ha. I follow over 2000 people, and 90% of the tweets I get are advertising, and I'm sure many of them are being sent via Twitter "bots"—programs designed to send out regular tweets. Eventually, I will weed out/unfollow those who are turning my Twitter feed into their own personal annoying pop-up message…but it will likely take months to do that. The more people you follow that you don’t know, the more annoying Twitter can be. Downloads that filter Twitter like TweetDeck become a necessity when you start following many people.
3. Too many red light districts. I’m starting to be followed by porn sites (who—mysteriously—are actually rather obvious about who they are) almost every day. Certainly I block them as soon as I find out who they are, but this has become as tiresome as having to delete all those Viagra messages that used to show up in my email. Twitter is going to have to figure out a way to keep from being taken over by bots.
4. A Direct Message system that's as much fun as the dentist. It works, but it can become unmanageable. We're back to the "bots" again—too many people have set up "auto-replies" that send you a Direct Message as soon as you follow someone new. This clogs up your inbox with unwanted messages and Twitter’s clunky interface makes it time-consuming to deal with it.

Yes, last time I checked…Twitter was still free, and it was still my choice to use it. But like any other retail product or free service, I’m only using it as long as I’m interested in it. With no known business model and ever-increasing user issues, Twitter leaves itself at risk to being quickly overtaken by "the next big thing."