"Something is technically wrong" is the understatement of the year. It's ridiculous. As Michael Arrington said, if Twitter could keep the site live for 24 consecutive hours that would be news.It's interesting. I'm reading Getting Real, the e-book from 37Signals (the guys who made Ruby on Rails on which Twitter is built). In it they're quite adamant about launching your product/site quickly and with minimal features - worry about scalability later. The whole time I've been reading it I've had the thought, "Oh yeah? What about Twitter?" rolling around in the back of my head.
I'm the first to admit I know zero about building web apps (I consider myself a consumer geek, not a back-end geek). But I do know that from a user standpoint, if your product crashes this frequently with no explanation as to why or when it will be back up, something's gotta change.
I don't know if the problem lies with Rails' inability to scale or Twitter's. But Twitter needs to figure it out and it certainly seems like they've had enough time to do so.
I think you should blog about why twitter hasn't lost many users do to downtime.
ReplyDeleteHmmm...an interesting thought. I'll have to ponder that. In the meantime, do you want to take a stab at it Hugh? Do a guest post or something like that?
ReplyDeleteIs anyone else really sick about hearing about Twitter?
ReplyDeleteHmmm Dave,
ReplyDeletetwit·ter –verb
2. to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters; chatter.
It sounds like Twitter, by definition may be facilitating this outcome with it's users by design.
Doug
Am i the only twitter user who uses twitter so infrequently that I had no idea they had a problem with uptime?
ReplyDeletePeter - What about Twitter are you sick of hearing about? That it's down? That it exists? ...?
ReplyDeleteMinty - Good point. This could be part of their master plan.
Brett - Yeah, I think you might be. Gotta get on it.