Well, after all my rants about Twitter’s IM client and its perpetual downtime (both here and on forums), Twitter has finally issued a white-flag statement:
To summarize, we want to bring IM back. We intend to bring IM back. But we’ve officially moved it 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. Like any budget (in this case, the budget of our limited engineering time), tough calls need to be made—especially in these times. And while we don’t expect everyone to agree with this decision, we at least want to be straightforward with you.
Lesson learned:
Startups are all about launching things that are not ready for prime time—because startups don’t live in prime time. You can always rush to make something ready if people like it. Except when you can’t. The process of going from being able to throw things at the wall and see if they stick, to really thinking carefully about how something’s going to scale and effect the system as a whole, is an inevitable evolution that companies go through (if they’re successful). Sometimes they do it gracefully, sometimes less so.