My problem: submitting bug reports is sometimes <i>hard</i>.<p>Every so often, I come across a bug with one of the apps I use on my Ubuntu machine - be it Chrome, Firefox, Amarok, or something else. I go through the process of figuring out <i>exactly</i> what triggers the bug, and sometimes even try out gdb on the app to see what's going on... then I go to the bug reporting page, realize I need to make some Launchpad account or some hassle like that, and decide that I'm too lazy to report it. (And every piece of software uses a separate bug tracker, so you need a separate account for each bug that you want to report!)<p>Not very accessible to the casual user...<p>(At least, this has been my experience.)
Twitter is not exactly a forum for well-considered insightful comments. A "fail" twitter is not that significant - more on the order of a wtf exclamation, which I emit many times when trying any new program.<p>That said, as a guy that likes to get bug reports (better than NOT getting them and really failing), it helps to have ANY details, not "it doesn't work" but "on the Score page, hitting Profile does nothing" kind of thing.
I certainly hope this wasn't the author's software that was being tweeted about. Because if so, this is about the worst possible way to handle it. In fact, this is a really good opportunity to make things <i>better</i>.<p>If I ever make an angry tweet about something, mediocre companies ignore me or never find it. <i>Good</i> companies will say "We're sorry you're having problems. What can we do to help?" I'm probably happier with those companies than if I hadn't tweeted about them angrily. What does it look like when a customer (who may genuinely have a valid complaint that won't fit in 140 characters) is obviously angry and the person who publishes the software's only response is an angry blog post? And no, issues involving Michael Arrington don't count. That's a special case. :-)
Great point. I think I, myself am guilty of mentioning some #fail in my twitter feed which was probably better served as a bug report.<p>But when you write something in your twitter feed then it's usually not something you want to follow through on and if you actually <i>do</i> want a solution, I think most people would actually go the extra mile and ask at a forum or file a bug report.