Kind of ironic that the reason I'm writing about Twitter's lameness is because I want to read some of my friend's tweets and post a few of my own. See, a few months ago I signed up for an account, decided I wasn't really all that thrilled with how Twitter was broadcasting all my private messages to specific individuals to every single person who had subscribed to my feed, and canceled it. After a while I kinda started to miss the connectivity it gave me to people that I don't see very often, and last week I decided to try and reactivate my account. Only its not that simple.
I logged into the Twitter site with my old user-name and password and was told, "Hi Roger, click here if you want to reactivate your account." I did, received an email that said, "Click on this link to reactivate you account." and proceeded to be unimpressed. The link to me to the login page, with a banner that told me it couldn't verify that I had requested an account restoration. WTF? I mean, they sent me the confirmation email, right?
Frankly, I really have a hard time understanding how a site like Twitter can have such piss-poor account management. I mean stuff like you can only have an email address or mobile phone number linked to a single account is weak. Combined with the inability to delete and reactivate your account means that you essentially sign up with a single account once, for life.
Google, please buy Twitter out, or provide similar functionality via Gmail chat, so that we don't have to keep dealing with idiots who can't manage a database.
