• Published:May 26th, 2008
• Comments:2 Comments
• Category:Blog Comments

Twitter is a microblogging platform that lets people post short “status updates” online in tiny 140-character bursts. I like it because it lets me get out brief, pithy thoughts that aren’t quite worth an entire blogpost or that tread too closely to the “talking about yourself is a no-no” guideline that I set up in my head a few years back for my personal blog. It’s also one of the prime examples of Web 2.0 wherein it offers a platform for expression and very little else. Its growth has been meteoric, with something like nineteen bazillion active members online at any one time, thus causing the usual growing pains, with the past week or so featuring a few outages and disabled features while the development team attempts to scale up their operations to match the new masses using the service.

Twitter is, it should be noted, free to use. This is why people display an extraordinary amount of vitriol and condescension in the comments for a recent post apologizing for the downtime and explaining what’s happened.

Joe Manna shoots out of the gate with some hard technical questions:

Why can’t twitter just purchase the equipment and get the OC-12s they need? Didn’t you folks just raise $15M in funding?

I strongly suggest twitter sets up geo-located Co-Lo’s around the world and the states.

Basically, West Coast, Midwest, East Coast locations. Then make the twitter servers round-robin from their localized server to other ones. So at least outages can be isolated to regions instead of the whole service.

It’s frustrating that when I finally give Twitter a chance, your servers bite the dust.

Yes, Joe. I’m sure they’re very sorry that the world is missing out on your taco-eating updates and will take your advice as the impetus to immediately launch into action.

David gives one of those “If I were…” comments that make me want that throat-chopping-over-IP technology even more:

if i were an investor, i’d be asking to see your tech department’s letters of resignation right about now.

He’s joined by someone who knows where they can find a sudden replacement for the tech-void David’s suggestion would create:

Time to just go to Wall Street and hire a real database person from Bloomberg or Reuters – someone that knows how to move massive amounts of data in short-form.

It’s obvious that the SF/SV engineers are not up to the task. Hire someone that is up to the task and get this shit done.

Yes. Silicon Valley and San Francisco engineers don’t know how to GIT-R-DUN.

Hang on! Erazmus has a fantastic idea:

Enough already. How about monetize this thing? Some of us would actually pay for a working Twitter.

That $19 is going to go a long ways towards fixing this problem, I’m sure.

Oh, hey, someone’s about to talk about the competition!

dear twitter. i’ve had enough of your on again / off again attitude. i’m leaving you for friendfeed. all the cool kids are making the switch. sorry. you fail.

As a cool kid, I can assure you this is not the case.

Kiki has an analogy I don’t quite understand:

I don’t pay to vote, either, yet I’ll certainly complain when that’s flawed, too. But I’m not going to leave the country on account of it, and I’m not giving up on Twitter, either.

The Mad Doctor is a materials scientist in Silicon Valley and has some ideas:

Break down and do a few things with the VC funding:

(1) Hire a systerm architect.
(2) Hire someone who has worked with large databases and rapid data transfer.

You could recruit for (2) at SLAC which, until Google, was moving the most data in the world the fastest. Maybe they still do. And, they just had a layoff!

I digress (and yes, I was at SLAC from 2002-2004; great people, great place.)

(3) If you haven’t already, get rid of that silly toy known as Ruby on Rails. It’s shite.

It’s amazing how someone can make a fine, fine argument and undo it completely with a hackneyed Britishism they picked up in their college theater classes.

Chris Thomson is emo:

Good luck with getting Twitter back up. Oh, but then it’ll probably crash again.

This pretty much sums up how Twitter’s been working lately:

http://twitter.com/_evan/statuses/819151648

Is there an emoticon for hanging yourself because a free internet service isn’t working over a holiday weekend when you should be fucking off with your friends? I hope so!

For some reason, I hear Ward Cleaver when I read this comment:

I have never seen a tech company have so many failures and outages than Twitter. People will only put up with it for so long.

Finally, a suggestion from the staff here at GOTI. Visit Whentwitterisdown.com. It can help.