Jan
30
Another Day, Another Twitter Outage
January 30, 2008 |
Just after the guys at Twitter posted a glowing review of their host on the Twitter blog, the Republican Debate took its toll on everybody’s favorite waste of time communication tool and took it offline once again - for the second time today.
According to the Twitter folks, they are working hard on throwing hardware at the problem:
While we’re busy building Twitter, Joyent is working tirelessly to bring in more RAM, more CPUs, more hardware, and more late night support—never charging us for bandwidth is worth an extra mention.
Looks like that isn’t enough.
On the one hand, the fact that this freaks people out is a sign that Twitter indeed is the crack cocaine that keeps the Web 2.0 folks going.
On the other hand, though, this kind of stuff is what ultimately doomed Friendster and allowed MySpace to jump into the niche. It wasn’t better, but it wasn’t down all the time either.
The problem for Twitter is that its competitors like Jaiku and Pownce actually offer more features and seem to be built on more stable platforms.
Loyalties on the web shift easily. Twitter has a lot of goodwill among its users, but in the end, if Twitter can’t deliver, people will go somewhere else. It only takes a few people with a lot of friends to start moving away before everybody else to switch as well.
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I wouldn’t say that loyalties are fickle, necessarily. It took a bit of abuse from Twitter to make me start my shift, and twitter could feasibly win me back (I haven’t left, as of present).
That isn’t meant to diminish the seriousness of the issue Twitter faces. It’s shape up or ship out time for them.
I agree it takes some time before people are fed up with something, but once they are, there is no stopping them from leaving.
I am not leaving Twitter until I see my friends leaving. Once they do, though, there is no looking back.
While I’m not jumping on the “dump Twitter” bandwagon (even if there was one), I’m as frustrated as you are.
Ev, Biz & Co. are at that magical point - put up or shut up. If they can’t build a stable, reliable tool - why would people stick around.
Like many, I’ve still got accounts on Jaiku, Pownce, Hictu, etc… from when I was investigating them months ago. I can easily move to another service if the time comes. I just don’t want it to.
Regards,
Rick
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The larger problem is these breakdowns are taking place without any significant mainstream market penetration. If a macworld keynote can bring down twitter imagine what American Idol would do to it.
It is interesting to note that the excellent Brad Fitzpatrick of Danga.com has an excellent set of presentations on how certain applications will never scale well if the database back-end is poorly designed, improperly load balanced, etc.
And I’ll go further on his topic of write saturation: this is probably what is plaguing twitter. You can throw all the hardware you want at an improperly designed system and you will only get marginal improvements if the DB is write saturating.
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