Many months ago, the IM feature of Twitter disappeared. Apparently it was killing the Twitter servers. For months people were told, “it’s coming back, we’re working on it”.

Apparently not.

Anxiously awaiting the return of Twitter IM? Don’t hold your breath; the micro-blogging site has no plans to restore instant messaging to the site any time soon.

“We want to bring IM back. We intend to bring IM back. But we’ve officially moved it from our ‘things that are broken list’ to ‘things that we want to build list‘”, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams wrote in a Friday blog post. “Based on our analysis, the cost-to-benefit for IM for the most users is not as high as some other things–so it will be a while before we tackle it.”

That’s too bad. A lot of people relied on that part of the service and they were strung along into thinking it was coming back soon. Now that it’s on the “we want to build” list, it’s likely we, as Twitter users, will never see it again. It’s like the wine of the month club. If you missed the wine last month, chances are you will never get that one again.

I want to build a boat, but it’s not like I have time to put the wood together.

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