Early last week, WooThemes announced that they were shutting down their Twitter support channel. You can read the entire post here, but there were a few quotes in the article that I really liked.

First:

And a lot to say. And that pretty quickly, questions get technical and DMs and 140 characters are not ideal facilitators of such things.

Secondly:

Everyone with a smart phone has a soap box.

With our users being of the techie variety most are on Twitter and it’s a space where we frequently get questions about products, potluck inquiries, reports of glitches, panicked alerts about problems, shout-outs, suggestions et al. It’s a mixed bag!

And finally:

But after letting @WooSupport run for a while realised what it was actually doing was creating an expectation that we never intended to meet which was that we were able to actually give support over Twitter.

The article also goes on to discuss interesting things such as how support requests are unique, individual problems are unique, and managing support via Twitter versus a dedicated ticket (like in ZenDesk) can be problematic.

Props to them for doing this.

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Of the developers I know and respect (or who are worth their weight in gold code) have often expressed this negative feeling that occurs at the end of the project.

You know: The one where you feel like the code could be better, the architecture could be better, the feeling that there’s so much room for refactoring, and so on and on it goes.

It’s practically the total opposite of when a project starts. That is, you set out with this clear goal in mind of what you want to achieve and are excited by the prospect of building this pristine system that’s going to be a work of art – it’ll be some of the best code that you’ve ever written.

Until it’s not.

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