The Great Internet Twit-Out. I don't get it.

Some posts this evening about a twitter boycott scheduled for 5/21 to protest the outages at twitter.  Where I'm all for protests that have some meaning, I really don't understand this one.  As far as I'm concerned a protest makes sense when a company's customers feel that the company is willfully mistreating them.  A perfect example of this is the livejournal protest from last month.  LJ users felt that adding adverting without notifying them was unfair and protested.  Whether the protest was successful or not, is another question, not for this post.

In the case of twitter, there is not willfulness behind their mistreatment, just incompetence.  The last thing the folks at twitter want is this negative publicity.  If it were in their power, I believe these issues would've been fixed, so once must believe that twitter's issues are not easily fixed.  Whether it's Ruby on Rails, the server infrastructure, database scalability or some  issue that we haven't discussed these problems are large.  I suspect some of the more public staff changes as of late are attempt to get these problems under control.

From this post:

Taking place on Wednesday, May 21st (or a week from today if you’re too tired or too lazy to look that far ahead,) Twit-Out is our chance to show Twitter that WE ARE TWITTER. Without us, there is no community.

I haven't seen any indication that the folks at twitter think otherwise, have you?  I believe that they built a platform that grew out of control and have been unsuccessfully playing catchup ever since. Whatever they do to increase capacity, isn't matching the growth in their client base.  To quote the great Yogi (Berra) "It's so crowded nobody goes there anymore".

And further more, it provides a chance to show that Twitter is no longer the only way for us to communicate with a similar platform, whether it be via FriendFeed (the preferred method for communicating on Twit-Out) or your microblogging stream of choice.

This brings up the real question.  Why give them a chance?  Over the past year a number of microblogging platforms have been introduced pounce, and jaiku are some examples.  Why do we still come back to twitter like a battered spouse?  In a related question .. what will make this protest successful?  I refuse to believe that even if no one tweets on 5/21 that on 5/22 twitter will become stable for all time (and if it does it won't be related to the boycott).  That's not how software works.

So, if you're boycotting, what do you expect from it?