Let's talk about Twitter. Boiled down, Twitter is just a standalone Facebook status. Really, that's all it is. A glorified, "this is what I'm doing right now" application. My friends were always telling me to get it so they can know what I'm doing. No? Like with everything, I gave in. Twitter became a necessity. It's in my Firefox, my phone, my Facebook status and my website. You will always know what I'm doing. Unfortunately, Twitter has recently met its arch-nemesis: TOO MANY USERS! Since its entrance into the spotlight, has sharply increased to 2.2 million twitterers, but this growth was either not anticipated or underestimated. TechCrunch revealed that Twitter's recent uptime has been averaged at 98%, which is over 5 whole days total out of a year without service.

Now onto my use for Twitter. I've been working on getting multiple Twitter feeds on the website for a few days now and I thought I had it. Twitter offers two main solutions to having a "badge" on a site: Javascript and Flash. The JS seems more universal since that one person browsing the site may not have Flash, but there's a problem. I want multiple Twitter feeds for the multiple editors on the site. Writing one section for the first Twitter works fine, but adding a second one causes a really weird JS error. The feed for the second Twitter is in the place of the first; the first is missing. This happens when the browser renders the JS for the second feed.

Works:

• Firefox 2
• Flock
• Camino
• Seamonkey

• Firefox 3
• IE 7
• Safari

I discovered through testing that the working browsers have one thing in common: their platform. They all use the Gecko v1.8.1 browser platform (engine) and I can only assume that this is related to the JS rendering error. Firefox 3 and Flock 2 (beta) have since upgraded to the Gecko v2 platform, which causes the error. I'm looking for something that will render the first javascript, stop, then render the next javascript. There is also a problem on the rare (/s) occasion that Twitter is down. Using the code they provide, if Twitter is down, your site might not load. I learned this the hard way. Fantastic. I'm still looking for the right JS to load my multiple Twitter badges correctly and compensate if Twitter is down. I still update my Twitter every chance I get, but I won't put my money on a horse that only leaves the gates 98% of the time.