Twitter’s struggles harm more than just the users

January 31, 2008 | MG Siegler | Comments | |

twitterMicro-messaging site Twitter (Crunchies Award Winner for Best Mobile Start Up) has had a lot of issues with downtime in recent months. This is not only alienating users, it’s having rippling effects on the Internet community as a whole.

While the service had a scheduled downtime for maintenance last night, they overshot their window by several hours, even extending into today after founder Ev Williams wrote a post on the Twitter blog apologizing for the downtime and declaring the service back on line.

To make matters worse, they had just written a post yesterday praising their infrastructure and its high scalability – a scalability which many users questioned after the service crashed under the weight of usage during MacWorld.

But it’s not just the users who are struggling to cope with Twitter’s downtime. Twitter’s service have become a valuable part of many other start-ups and serves a complimentary role to some large services.

Tweetmeme and Politweets are two start-ups that rely completely on Twitter for their services to work. FriendFeed meanwhile imports all users’ tweets into its activity streams. Likewise, Yahoo’s MyBlogLog also has Twitter integration as a main component of users’ profiles. Then of course there is Facebook where many users tie their status updates directly to their Twitter updates.

The point of Twitter’s infrastructure post was to alert people that they were ready for this weekend’s upcoming Super Bowl, and the massive amount of tweets it may bring. One can only hope that this latest round of maintenance gets the system ready for an upcoming schedule that includes not only Sunday’s game, but Super Tuesday, and the SXSW festival in March – which coincidentally is where Twitter first took off among early adopters last year.

Twitter is becoming an increasingly important application for the Internet at large and if it can’t be relied upon, it causes issues for more than just disgruntled users.

MG Siegler blogs on technology and new media at ParisLemon.com.

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About the Author, MG Siegler

MG Siegler writes about technology trends and new media for VentureBeat, with a focus on mobile topics, social elements and key news stories. Before that, MG wrote about technology on his blog, ParisLemon. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan where he studied film. He's previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he did web development. He now lives in San Francisco.

  • feedback
    Twitter either is used to boost self-importance or it is heavily abused by bloggers (ex. Scoble, Le Meur etc.) for spamming friends.
  • Their growing pains remind me a lot of eBay's early days. They had their fair share of extended down times 10 years ago but eventually got their act together. Hopefully Twitter will do the same.
  • Twitter has become a very useful part of my social network. When Twitter is down, we are definitely impacted.
  • @anon - certainly that is still very much an element of the service, but it does seem to be growing beyond that in many regards.

    @mike - that's a great point, I hope they clear it up as well.

    @roland - yeah I know quite a few people who feel your pain.
  • What's more fun is when all these little microsites, widget-things, video hosts and life stream plays get plowed under due to a lack of compelling revenue models, leaving a mess of interdependent, broken web 2.0 services. "Lower operating costs" isn't enough to keep all the also-rans afloat, especially if the attention span of the principals wanes with a slowing economy. Brutal.
  • MG,

    To Twitter's defense supporting millions of user all over the world, supporting nearly thousand API partners (including MessageDance) is not an easy job.
    More so when business model question is running ahead of adoption curve. As a business venture, they have to justify the expense as well.

    Though MessageDance ,unfairly, got positioned as competitor to Twitter (all we do is to transform email and generate 140 char tweet output), we do provide infrastructure assistance to Twitter ecosystem by supporting offline Twitter status updates. Today when Twitter was down, users were posting tweets on MessageDance website.

    Eric posted about us on VentureBeat ( http://tinyurl.com/2fkpd8 )

    -Brij
  • Nobody in the social messaging space likes to see such a prominent player take such a big hit in reliability and reputation. We're looking forward to reporting a 100% uptime result for www.bluepulse.com through the weekend.

    Oh, don't forget Super Tuesday is next week.

    Meanwhile, best wishes to the Twitter team - hope you get it all sorted out soon.
  • There are more and more social networking sites popping up every week. What ever happened to frienster? Facebook put them at the bottom of the map.
  • edhardy622
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