Twitter, the microblogging service launched in 2006, gets some mixed reviews here on Internet Evolution. But there's no denying its current popularity. Whether to document their impending lunch plans, or to promote a new business, the masses are flocking to Twitter with their every thought bubble and hiccup.

But can Twitter stay afloat without having yet established a firm business plan? (Twitter has raised $20.4 million in funding.) With its frequent outages, will it make a comeback before its users flock to rapidly emerging Twitter clones? Can Twitter serve any real business purpose beyond promoting mindless chatterfests about lunch meat?

Internet Evolution spoke with Twitter software engineer, Alex Payne, about all of the above and more -- including future plans for development, expanding the Twitter demographic, and his new site -- DownForEveryoneOrJustForMe -- letting Web users see whether a site is universally inaccessible, or if the trouble is with their connection.

Internet Evolution: What's the real reasoning behind the Twitter outages?

Alex Payne: It's a mix of things. And it sort of depends on what era in Twitter's brief history you're talking about. In early 2007, it was simply that Twitter started as a side project and was fairly under-resourced in terms of both machines and developers. So, for certainly the first few months after the South by South West conference in 2007, when Twitter really started to take off, we just didn't have enough servers to meet the demand and that sort of thing. But, once it became more of a full-time project, it was really a matter of the design of the system, I think, that was responsible for its outages. I've written a little bit about that on the Twitter developer blog, but I've pretty much just said that a messaging system was built out of components that were more appropriate for a content management system. It didn't scale well, it wasn't particularly fault tolerant. That kind of thing.

IE: What's being done right now to prevent future outages?

Payne: We're building a better system. Part of the engineering team is working on building a proper messaging system that borrows more from an engineering perspective from the way a phone company might design a system than the way a Web publication developer would design a system.

IE: How's it going, and how long are we looking at before something is in place?

Payne: So far it's going pretty well. We're developing in kind of a modular way. Some components of it are already live, some will be going live over the next few months. In the meantime, this past month has been one of the best in terms of stability, and message delivery, and of course new user signups -- that kind of thing. We have a better handle on the current system, and we're gradually transitioning it to a newer, more reliable system. So we're in a pretty good place.

IE: How is Twitter standing up to competitors, like Pownce and FriendFeed? Isn't it likely that Twitter users will migrate to a similar service if they have to deal with consistent outages?

Payne: Well, certainly we see that, when we're down, there are fewer signups -- obviously if people can't complete the signup process and that kind of thing. We certainly see more conversations about competing services when the service is unstable.

We don't necessarily view FriendFeed as a competitor, as a majority of data actually comes from Twitter, and they consume a stream of public updates from us, and we're in contact with their founders and development team. FriendFeed is a way for people to take conversations or ideas that popped up on Twitter and to continue that discussion in more of a threaded format which is useful for a certain audience but is not what Twitter is for. As far as we're concerned, that's a symbiotic relationship, not competition.

Likewise, Pownce, to my understanding, is still a fairly small community and is still fairly localized to the Bay Area. We do see people cross-posting status updates to Twitter and Pownce, and whatever the competition of the week is. And it's fine. The philosophy we've had for a while is you should be able to get data in and out of Twitter however you want, and send your status wherever you like. We keep our API open to make that possible, and if people want to use multiple services alongside Twitter so they can keep up with a different group of friends, that's fine.

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