Tweet this: unsatisfied customers are not a good basis for expansion

US OUTLOOK

I am a sporadic tweeter but a keen consumer of tweets. As anyoneusing Twitter knows, it is a great way of listening in to thethoughts of smart people (or dumb celebrities, if that's your bag),and of keeping up with the latest news. Yet my relationship withTwitter, like a lot of people's, is love-hate, which is why Ihaven't decided if it is on a Facebook trajectory, towards worlddomination, or a MySpace trajectory, towards - oh dear.

News arrives this week that Twitter is close to acquiringTweetDeck, which developed the most popular app for sifting andsorting all those tweets, for $40m or more. Until recently, the firmhas appeared happy to let developers build businesses using Twittercontent as their raw material. Now it seems intent on controllingany and all revenue there is to be made.

This is good business sense and not unfair. Congratulations toTweetDeck, and hard cheese for the unchosen few who built similarbusinesses on Twitter's content, only to find Twitter going intocompetition with them. Except that Twitter should get its own housein order before it starts bringing TweetDeck and other apps in-house.

Many of the external developers who flocked to build Twitter-related services have given up for fear of being put out of businesson a whim by Twitter itself. Their absence puts greater onus onTwitter to provide a quality experience for users and a reliableplatform for advertisers and any other businesses that want to payfor access. On this score, and to the increasing impatience of many,Twitter's own website and apps fall short.

Some frustrations are just bugs in the system and it ismystifying why they haven't been identified and fixed. Others aremore fundamental irritations. The window for dealing with them,before users start drifting away in disillusion, seems to me to benarrowing fast.

So, Twitter, here are 10 things I hate about you:

* Tweets from people I am following sometimes do not show up inmy feed.

* Twitter.com is repeatedly "unable to load earlier tweets".

* Refreshing a page containing the results of a search queryfails to bring in the latest tweets.

* The number of followers it says I have is sometimes differentfrom browser to browser.

* Having to put "http://" at the start of links is a waste ofprecious characters.

* The "top tweets" that appear in search results are rarely theones I am looking for.

* It is impossible to easily follow interesting conversationsthat occur when two Twitter users are replying to each other.

* Searching for a topical subject throws up tweet after tweetlinking to the same news stories.

* Robots are running rampant, automatically retweeting ormessaging people based on key phrases and clogging the system withspam.

* The official Twitter app for my iPhone stopped working a monthago and inexplicably gives me nothing but the message: "Privateaccount". The app was created by outside developers and acquired byTwitter last year. I swear it worked when they bought it.

Twitter was notorious for service outages its early days, and inthat respect has improved immeasurably, but it is still far toobuggy, clunky and unsatisfying.

Its failure to match up against the development prowess of lesser-funded internet businesses is no doubt partly the result ofmanagement turmoil at the company. The return of the founder, JackDorsey, might have been cause for optimism, were he not going tosplit his time between Twitter and his more recent start-up, Square.

Yes, I know I am getting Twitter free, but that is no longer anexcuse. The company's exponentially growing user numbers have helpedit attract more than $300m of investment at ever-increasingvaluations, and I just want to ask those investors: what is acustomer worth if they are an unsatisfied customer? I for one refuseto take Twitter's purported valuation of $7.7bn seriously until theproduct starts to feel less like a beta test from a hand-to-mouthstart-up.

So far the company has survived in spite of itself, withnourishment from the ecosystem around it. Its bid for TweetDeckdemonstrates that it wants to control more of the user experiencefor itself - but is it competent?

Now, where is US inflation hiding?

Some people will never be persuaded that inflation is dead. Butthe US Government released a picture of the labour market hereyesterday, and it was notable for the absence of any wage inflationpressures.

How could it be otherwise, with the unemployment rate at 9 percent and the number of citizens out of work at 13.7m still? Averagehourly earnings were 1.9 per cent higher in April compared with thesame month last year, actually a slowdown from March.

The number of new payrolls beat economists' expectations, just asthey had started to think their numbers were optimistic, so thatbrought some comfort yesterday. But the number of new temporaryjobs, often an indicator that employers are on the verge of hiringfull-time staff, dipped in April. Getting out of the post-recessionhole is going to be tough.

Worst of all, 5.8m Americans have been out of work for half ayear or more, and many may find themselves undesirable even toemployers with vacancies. This problem isn't even on the radar inCongress yet, despite the warnings of Ben Bernanke at the FederalReserve.

Inflation hawks these days have the certainty of the conspiracytheorist, but in reality Mr Bernanke's description of the currentinflation spike as being "transitory" looks about right - especiallynow the speculative bubble in commodities prices is deflating.

One more thing from yesterday's payroll numbers: some 30,000 jobswere created in the food service and pubs sector, suggesting foodprice inflation hasn't stopped Americans eating out, either.