It's pretty bad when your company has a well known mascot associated with its inability to keep its site running. For Twitter, that mascot is the "fail whale," or the cutesy, one-dimensional drawing of a whale being held up by birds, which appears whenever Twitter is down. Lately it seems as if the whale has returned in full force.
When Twitter first started gaining attention last year after the SXSW conference in Austin, it was crashing regularly. Twitter's software engineer, Alex Payne, told us in August that the site simply "didn't have enough servers to meet the demand and that sort of thing." It didn't scale well because it wasn't built to be the messaging system it turned into.
For a while things seemed back on track. We all cheered when it survived Election Day, which was, allegedly, the ultimate test. But lately the service's uptime has been intermittent. And it isn't just us: A search on search.twitter.com for "fail whale" will reveal many Tweeters today complaining about the mammal's return.
Why?
Well, one could speculate. (And one will.)
Like it or not, Twitter has recently gone "mainstream" in the most irritating way. It's moved a bit from the tech circles and become the focal point of the lives of our talking media heads, celebrities, politicians, and talk show hosts who are regularly making headlines for their Twitteracy. It's apparently even being blamed for the breakup of Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer, who reportedly ended their relationship at least in part due to Mayer's Twitter addiction. (Twittiction? Twaddiction? We'll work on that one and get back to you...)
Further, the onslaught of third-party applications devoted to making it easier to post your 140-character updates from anywhere on the surface of the Earth (e.g., TweetDeck, TwitterBerry, TwitterFon, Twhirl...) only make the Tweets more superfluous (and, of course, more inane), and put more pressure on the Twitter servers.
Scalability has been an Achilles heel for Twitter from day one. Pair that with its lack of a business plan and you begin to see a real problem at a company that has recently witnessed unexpected popularity.
Internet Evolution submitted a question to Twitter's support service asking what is up with the whale, but we've yet to receive a response.
In the meantime, perhaps if you CelebriTwits really want to help keep Twitter up and running you should give its servers a rest and keep your critical updates to a minimum -- at very least, skip the details on your gassy lunch.
That was exactly the point I was trying to make. These guys are so busy that i really don't see them involve in that extended tweeter with so called fans. That is the reason why they employed people to run their tweeter program!!
But TD anyone can twist numbers around to make them look good.
Let's look at this from a different perspective:
52 weeks in a Caledar year. 84 hours of downtime...
That's approx 1.6 hrs / week... I don't know what industry you're in but if I had to keep my users off their systems for 1.6 hrs a week I'd be looking for a new job!!
This alone will keep Twitter from ever being "business/enterprise" worthy...
I can't believe what i just read that most celebrities never even get involved in sending tweets but rather delegating that responsibility to their IT team:
I heard a nice radio interview with their CEO. Smart guy. He has a business model which is to be bought.
Seems there are only 24 of them to run this whole show. Maybe time to sell some equity, hire some engineers, buy some servers and rent a piece of cloud.
At least it has given many a job - creating jokes and cartoons with the whale and twitter. I'm waiting for it to go mainstream enough that it gets to the simpsons or something like that.
And it took them this long to come with the most common business plan in the world? charge the power users something and the rest of us will piggyback? they sure are the smart ones of the group.
No, that's not a business plan, THIS is a business plan!
Seriously though, the addition of fee-based services is good news for everyone: Twitter wil be forced to upgrade its infrastructure for to satisfy the demands of the paid users, and the free users - riding on the same platform - will also enjoy the enhanced performance and reliability.
I haven't been to my Twitter page yet, so guess I need to check. I really hate when a site goes from being free to offering a "premium" site for pay, as it always seems that the site or business ends up making the free service become so bad, you almost have to change over or leave.
Now I don't mind sites that offer a free or premium right from the start, as you know what you'll get what you pay for from the start. But when I've been on something for a while that has been giving good service for free, then changes to a free or premium choice, and instead of just offering extra perks for the new premium, they make the old free service worthless, that I have a problem with.
I can only hope that if Twitter does offer a premium service, it will just add new perks and not take away from the service already in existence.
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