New Paradigm -- Crap Software

I am amazed at how flaky Twitter is, and yet it is a major force to be reckoned with in social media. Often times when I try to log it, it says "Twitter is busy now. Try again later."

Just this morning, I tried logging and saw this message:

SSL connection error

Unable to make a secure connection to the server. This may be a problem with the server, or it may be requiring a client authentication certificate that you don't have.

Error 107 (net::ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR): SSL protocol error.

I thought that it was something wrong with my machine because the error was thrown by 127.0.0.1 which is localhost or my computer. So I tried logging into Facebook, and there was no problem. I immediately knew that it was another Twitter issue.

It blows me away that there is a new paradigm in software -- putting out crap or buggy software, just to occupy a market space. The bugs get fixed later. If Twitter were production software in a company, it wouldn't cut the mustard.

In a similar vein, I use GIMP a lot to manipulate images. For the most part, it is OK, but when you do a series of transforms on the graphic, it has a tendency to crash. Regularly. GIMP is free, so you can't complain too much, but it still represents the concept of a less-than-perfect element thrown out to the public.

I'm willing to bet that what we will see, is software becoming obsolete before all of the bugs are fixed.

Is there anything to be done about it? I doubt it because although Twitter is a private company, and hasn't made money, it has huge potential to transform into super currency like Facebook did. As long as there is no financial incentive to put out good software, we will get buggy crap in our virtual worlds.