Entries Tagged 'twitter' ↓

I didn’t take it - I swear. I was nowhere near that server.

Tags: twitter

Dear Ev,

Frankly I’m baffled.  As I type this, Twitter is throwing a 503 error back to twitterific and is showing the newly idiotic "Something is technically wrong" web page at the home URL.  This is the morning after yet another period of system maintenance or upgrades.

Your goodwill is rapidly deteriorating.  The service is notoriously unstable, and in fact just yesterday I saw someone begin advocating against depending upon Twitter for emergency communication.  Why?  Too undependable.  This is quite a turn-around from the period during & after the San Diego fires, where Twitter was embraced by fire dept folks for use in just this type of situation.

It would be easy to say "You get what you pay for" - neither I, nor any user, pay to use Twitter.  And you’d be right.  But you’re trying to make this a business, and so I respectfully suggest that you begin running the operation as though *everyone* is paying.  Bring in some experts.  Redesign - from the ground up if necessary.

Once folks develop a habit of use, they begin to feel entitled.  They show up, you provide a workable twitter service, and somewhere along the way you figure out how to monetize.  That’s the value exchange.  But when they show up and all they encounter is a timeout (there’s the 503 again just now in twitterific) or a condescending error page, they feel cheated.  People are funny that way. 

And they will leave.  As I’ve said before, I really like Twitter.  But the value exchange is currently askew.

(oh, and there’s that 503 again… three times while I was posting.  )

Tags: twitter

Twitter - I like you.  Really.  But enough with the completely unstable platform already, ok?  You have the money and buzz to get whatever is necessary to stabilize your service.  Simply creating a new "Service is down" page ain’t cutting it.

Someone else will figure out how to replace you if you don’t get this right very soon.  Are you really off-line, like the 404 message indicates?  Or is your load balancing solution giving up the ghost?

Whatever the issues, they’ve been going on for so long that you’re now on the receiving end of the dreaded Open Letter to Twitter.   I want you guys to succeed, so please get your shit together.

Tags: twitter

Twitter was off line long enough yesterday for me to notice (I variously rec’vd 500 pages as well as ‘Connection reset; server too busy’ pages). No mention of it in the 20 or so blogs I follow.

The 500 error indicated a back-end problem; this wasn’t just a matter of too much front-door traffic. We’ve already seen the response to that in the form of the tweety-bird page. 500 errors are the server’s way of saying “Holy Shit. I give up.”

I think Ruby’s edges (or core maybe) are showing here. This has been discussed at length at Laughing Meme, but I haven’t seen much about this subject on Twitter’s blog. Lots of folks are using Ruby daily, with many of them adopting Rails, and all of them have a stake in its future.

Performance is a tough characteristic to engineer into a language after the fact. Is Ruby/Rails going to be able to pull this off, or will it remain “…dead slow” to the point of no longer being considered for scalable web development?

Certainly, this is not the first time Twitter has had an outage. The outages were so common for awhile that they were referred to as “…yet another period of downtime” in this posting at Techcrunch . But didn’t anyone else notice? More likely they don’t care. After reloading the page a few times & seeing the errors, I gave up & didn’t check in again until this morning.

If your service can be offline (or at least unusable) for that long without any impact, then monetizing it might be problematic.

Tags: twitter, ruby, rails

Could be.  My frequency of twitter updates has exceeded that of my blogging, which itself may not be a surprise.  Blogging requires an effort easily an order of magnitude greater than tweeting.  Exaggeration?  I don’t think so, and I surmise that this ‘reduced friction’ has accelerated Twitter adoption.

Tags: twiitter, blogging