Okay, my headline’s a bit facetious. While Twitter chief architect Blaine Cook’s departure probably had nothing to do with the caching issue that rendered the service useless this weekend, his absence certainly did not help the team resolve the issue as quickly as they might have liked.
Cook tells Silicon Alley Insider that he left Twitter, the short-form messaging service, just over two weeks ago, but called it an “amicable change.” Mike Arrington of TechCrunch speculates that it might not have been so amicable given the issues with scaling Twitter has had over the past several months, but Cook notes that he is likely to stay on as an advisor to the service.
Twitter comes under a lot of scrutiny because it is so beloved — especially in the tech crowd. Frequent downtime causes frustration in some (this guy) who have come to use the service as a vital means of communication. There are larger ramifications as well when Twitter has issues. Many services and business are starting to use Twitter as a key component of what they do. When Twitter goes down, it hurts them.
Beyond this, Twitter is useful for spreading news about breaking stories and events (such as earthquakes), can be instrumental during times of crisis (such as the San Diego fires) and can be a great tool to meet up with people if you’re in a city or area that you don’t live in.
With the issues from this past weekend resolved, Twitter launched a special version of the service for Japan last night. That version will have advertisements, in a likely test of what is to come in this country.
We’ve contacted Twitter for a comment on Cook’s departure and its effect on this past weekend and will update if we hear back.
Tags: co:Twitter4 Comments
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Albert said:
I am a twitter fan myself and use it consistently. I have also noticed the downtimes that it has experienced, but otherwise it’s pretty reliable. I’m currently at the Web 2.0 Expo and a bunch of people here are twittering.
It seems to be growing pretty steadily - not as viral as I thought it would be. I completely agree that it is a powerful tool during crises. I’ll twitter an update soon. Good post MG,
-Al
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Curt Monash said:
Be prepared for several bumpy re-architectures, if Twitter grows. Because in that case the functionality has to change a lot, putting even more stress on scalability.
http://www.texttechnologies.com/2008/02/09/scalable-twitter/ and related posts explain why.
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Mark Evans said:
The high expectations that people have about a free service is fascinating. The same goes for Skype and GMail. When you pay nothing for something, how much can you really complain?
If the Twitterati want five 9s service, they should ask Twitter to roll out a premium service that comes with a monthly fee.
Mark
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Edward Vielmetti said:
you guys have a short memory, don’t you? yes you do.
blogger was similarly unreliable back in the day. it was awesome, and it sucked sometimes, but we loved it. (and it got a lot more reliable when it was swallowed up by the goog, but then you started to notice some of its limits).
systems that are up 99.999% of the time are quite simply boring. they disappear into the infrastructure, and there are no infrastructure heroes. twitter is no where near the boring stage, and so it should be expected to have some downtime, just so that people who are content with a 4 8s of reliability instead of 5 9s can do creative and fascinating things just to see if they can’t do it.
8 Trackbacks
6:16 pm
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[...] and operations added to the Twitter team back in January, has left the company. That follows the departure of chief architect Blaine Cook, for reasons still not entirely clear. Twitter has come under a lot of criticism this past year for [...]
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Twitter to jump off Ruby on Rails? » VentureBeat said:
[...] problem with downtime has lessened, but it experienced a caching problem a week ago that made the service virtually useless for an entire weekend. The company may have decided that if it wants to continue growing — without risking further [...]
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Obligatory post about Twitter being down yet again » VentureBeat said:
[...] can I do? Help me help you. I repeat, help me, help you. Do you need more servers? Can you not find anyone to help scale the service? Do you maybe need more funding? We know some people in that [...]
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Drew Blas - Ruby on Rails and the life of a passionate developer said:
Why Rails really can scale…
There have been a number of posts throughout the community recently talking about scaling Rails. Of course this has been an endlessly debated issue for years now, but it is coming back to the forefront thanks to news like Blaine…
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Why Rails really can scale « Drew Blas - The life and code of a passionate developer said:
[...] issue for years now, but it is coming back to the forefront thanks to news like Blaine Cook’s recent departure from Twitter (and Twitter�s many other recent issues). I feel it’s time to throw my two [...]
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Why Rails really can scale « Drew Blas - The life and code of a passionate developer said:
[...] issue for years now, but it is coming back to the forefront thanks to news like Blaine Cook’s recent departure from Twitter (and Twitter’s many other recent issues). I feel it’s time to throw my two [...]
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Pivotal Labs to help rebuild Twitter following persistent downtime issues » VentureBeat said:
[...] as it has continued to grow (not unlike ourselves, as our readers may have noticed earlier today). Its chief software architect recently left and the company has been looking at options for rebuilding the [...]
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Pivotal Labs to help rebuild Twitter following persistent downtime issues » VentureBeat said:
[...] as it has continued to grow (not unlike ourselves, as our readers may have noticed earlier today). Its chief software architect recently left and the company has been looking at options for rebuilding the [...]