RSSTwitter experiences another flutter
By Tim Conneally | Published May 21, 2008, 11:24 AM
In an environment predicated upon all users updating as frequently as possible, social microblog Twitter has revealed its hamartia: that it can absolutely not sustain downtime.
Granted, the service experienced numerous outages in the course of two weeks -- to say nothing of the past few months -- but in combing through the Twitter support forum under the heading "May 20: Twitter Downtime," it becomes apparent that every time the site experiences a service disruption, users are left stranded.
Twitter rep Jason Goldman attempted to calm the grumbling users: "Essentially what has been happening is that we've been trying to make changes in order to improve the long-term reliability of the service. Those changes have introduced instability in the short-term, however."
In the social media realm, however, quality of service is not the determining factor for success; it's user base. The more people start using Twitter, the more entrenched it becomes, downtime or not.
Still, the site's persistent outages have some looking for solutions through decentralization.
OH GAWD I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT MY TWITTER
people are stupid.
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"...it becomes apparent that every time the site experiences a service disruption, users are left stranded."
No s**t Sherlock! Say it ain't so!
I don't care for Twitter, but that line right there shows excellent reporting and analytical skills.
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Who cares if they experience downtime? Is it that big a deal? Its not as if its a critical service.
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Here's an idea: stop telling everyone what you're doing every 8 seconds (as if anyone really cares), and you won't worry about the site being down for short periods of time.
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Not to mention the fact that you obviously have way too much time on your hands if you have the opportunity to go through your 400 followers and see what each and every one of them are doing at any given time.
I'm sure it's exceptionally streamlined, but some portion of decentralization makes sense for something like this. There's no need to go to twitter.com every time you want to do something with the userbase. Kind of retarded if you ask me.
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