TweetDeck On iPhone #NotFail

TweetDeck, the popular Adobe-based client that enhances your Twitter experience partly by, well, keeping you off the Twitter.com site, is now available as an iPhone app.Not without some initial problems -- Rackspace CTO John Engates Tweeted yesterday morning that "Tweetdeck on iPhone has crashed several times this morning."

But notice that he didn't use the F-word. I'm not talking about the F-word people think of when they hear the term "F-word," but another four-letter word beginning with the letter F that should be regarded with similar opprobrium, but which is getting used and abused all over the Internet by bloggers and other weisenheimers who apparently think they hung the moon.

But seriously, F&%!? Really? There's a bunch of palm-sized do-hickeys that let you broadcast your every thought across cyberspace, but if it doesn't work for a nanosecond, you're going to let loose with an F-bomb? Really?

There's a world-wide recession, civil wars brewing in Iran, Pakistan and a few other countries ending in -stan, and you're riled up enough about a piece of software served from the nanosphere not being perfect enough, fast enough, or suffering from a momentary hiccup, to drop an F-bomb on the sucker?

I'm not just talking about TweetDeck, but about any piece of technology which, if you think about it for a minute, is a pretty amazing accomplishment considering we were slinking out of the primeval ooze only a geological blink of an eye ago.

Getting back to Engates, not only didn't he use the F-word with regards to TweetDeck, he mildly Tweeted, "Hope that gets fixed soon."

Since I had the chance to meet up with him a few hours later, I mentioned his omission of the F-word. Probably because he's a technologist himself and knows just how hard it is to get stuff perfectly right, he said he'd like to see some of those arrogant critics try their hand at developing something before using the F-word when a piece of technology misses the mark.

To me, it's a little like being at a Yankee game and listening to some moron yell at Alex Rodriguez that his grandmother could have hit that fastball. His grandmother? I'd like to see the guy go down on the field and give it a try himself; he'd probably tear a knee ligament simply trying to get out of the way of an inside pitch.

(Another thing Scoble and I agree on is the idiocy of hash-tags. Putting #infrontofeverything doesn't make you smart or cool. So cut it out.)

Technology is created to make our lives better, and part of that technology is about communication, and while it often feels like the conversation is solipsistic, a conversation about technology that makes use of technology can speed the pace of innovation and incremental improvements in our daily lives.

But using the F-bomb to dismiss a disappointing piece of software isn't just arrogant -- it's destructive, because it undermines the seriousness of the conversation and discourages innovators from taking risks.

We should ban the F-word, and we should stop subscribing to feeds and following people who use it.