As I posted a couple of updates to my Twitter stream this morning, I noticed that I hadn’t received any updates for most of two hours in my Twhirl client. I tried going to my Twitter page and when I couldn’t I naturally tried to go to http://www.istwitterdown.com… today the answer was not “Yes”, but rather:
It’s really very sad when “Yes” becomes “of course”. When the expectation is that the service will be down, you really have to wonder about the long-term viability of the service. At some point Twitter will cross the proverbial “threshold of pain” that will indeed cause users to flock to other services. Judging from past history, that threshold is very high… but with Twitter’s frequent outages lately, you have to wonder if we aren’t rapidly approaching that point.
I see from Twitter’s new status blog that they were making database changes last night. Will the changes be enough to keep people using the service? Will they be enough to bring the pain level back down?
We’ll see.
Technorati Tags:
twitter
Twitter is Tivo. It’s a service, not a company. I GET why they are having so many issues. The architecture is bad. But they are at the forefront of (potentially at least) a pretty significant change in the way communications work on the internet.
But if they don’t get it right soon, it’s going to be too late.
No it wasn’t enough to keep us using the service , instead we now post to our self-hosted microblog at http://microblog.weloveit.info/
Instead of a single service (point of failure) why not use RSS and Jabber protocols to create a more distributed network of social sites ?