What do you do when search doesn't work on Twitter

Last week, I met some interesting people and decided to see if I could find them on Twitter. The only problem was, when I went to search, I saw the following message: “Twitter can’t search because it’s bit stressed out from all the tweets.” I felt stuck, because I wanted to start following the people, and get in front of them as well. My room mate suggested that if I knew there user name I could simply use twitter.com/username and then add the people.

This turned out to be a very workable solution and I was able to add the people I wanted to connect with, but it also helped me realize that it’s sometimes too easy to get stuck using the obvious tools that an interface provides. Just because I couldn’t search for people, didn’t mean I couldn’t find those people if I had their usernames. But because the obvious tool wasn’t working, I had to find a workaround.

With any social media site, not just Twitter, there will be times when some kind of functionality isn’t working because the site is being improved or because it’s being overused and the functionality has to be shut down. It’s important to develop workarounds so that you don’t have to wait until the site is repaired. For twitter, it was fairly easy to just use the usernames after twitter.com. For other sites, there will be similar workarounds. Don’t let yourself get limited because the obvious interfaces don’t work.