Some days I feel like the old man of the web… not the crotchety, complaining one mumbling about how USENET, IRC and Gopher did everything the web does now only better, but the dazed and confused one, pointing his palsied finger at all the moving, shiny things he doesn’t understand. It started with class last night, which I thought went pretty well except a fair suspicion that I managed to unintentionally frustrate and annoy one of the younger students in trying to explain some of the history of social software and traditional social networking applications. I’m the kind of person who needs a narrative, and I have a particular narrative about the way MySpace and LinkedIn and Facebook have evolved from the roots of YASNSs that, in my (unnecessary) haste probably makes me less appreciative of the power those networks can have for their users.

My internet dog-years continue when I log into Twitter to find a stream of ranting about the flakiness of Twitter, which has not quite recovered from its downtime upgrades last night. Twitter has only been around for what– 18 months? Perhaps I’ve been jaded by the particular services I’ve stuck with in the past, but not being rock-solid during immense times of growth while only 18 months old (and only perhaps 6-9 months into a serious period of heavy adoption) doesn’t strike me as a horrible, time-to-switch-to-Jaiku problem. Del.icio.us went through this kind of thing, but worse, for years. Flickr is now owned by Yahoo but it still went down during MacWorld. Blogger was going down for 6-12 hours at a stretch for years. People griped, but the vitriol and the tendency to abandon ship sure seemed less than we see now. Now expectations are that a company will figure out how to provide a near real-time service with multiple paths for input and output that scales to accommodate exponential growth and has a full-featured API right out of the box. For free.

I will hold Twitter accountable for one regrettable decision: building a service that they had to hope would scale on Ruby on Rails, which seems to be the Achilles heel of a number of sites. And that stupid cat-with-screwdriver picture that was only remotely funny the first time.