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Archives for the 'Technology' Category
Twitter: ‘We’re not sure what’s happening’
In an untitled and verbose blog post yesterday, Twitter admitted it does not know what is causing its frequent service outages and asked for patience from users. “We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening.”
CNet’s Dave Rosenberg (@daveofdoom) warns Twitter that if it can’t keep its service up, it will suffer the fate of Friendster.
Twitter outage spurs rebuke from bloggers, contest
Twitter suffered another serious outage yesterday sparking a strong wave of criticism from bloggers.
One frequent complaint was Twitter’s lack of communications with users during outages. “[H]ow about just having enough respect for your users to let us know what’s going on, asked TechCrunch. Meanwhile VentureBeat noted that during major outages the official blog is rarely updated and it’s unclear to users where else to look for official information. Twitter finally posted a terse note on its blog taking responsibility for the outage.
Meanwhile, CNET’s Molly Wood (@mollywood) launched a contest to build a Twitter competitor. “I have had it with this Twitter situation,” she wrote. After consulting with software engineers, Wood is convinced that a better-scaling Twitter analog can be built in hours. To entice someone to build it, she offered some incentives:
I will go there, for a test period of not more than 30 days, and I will beg all of my followers to join me for this test period (as of this writing, a nice round 6,700). My colleague, Tom Merritt, says he’ll go there, too, and hopefully bring his followers along for the scalability test. I’ll ask everyone else I know on Twitter to come along (I’m talking to you, Leo Laporte), and we’ll see if it’s really as hard as all that to build a Twitter that can stand up to the awesome pressure of being Twitter.
The prize also includes other random gifts including a windbreaker.
When Obama wins Twitter will implode
In what has become an all-too-common occurrence, Twitter was down again yesterday. LAist and Mashable speculated that the outage was caused by heavy traffic following John Edward’s endorsement of Barrack Obama. In a post to its official blog, Twitter said the interruption was “not entirely to do with the Democrats, Space Aliens, Mysterious Men in Black, or Arugula.” Whatever the case, the Industry Standard writes that the schtick is getting old.
Twitter ex-chief architect speaks out
Silicon Alley Insider reports that Blaine Cook, Twitter’s recently departed (ousted?) chief architect has written his first blog post since leaving Twitter. The topic: Why Twitter can’t scale. “For all those who don’t get it, languages don’t scale, architectures do.” This is a reference to the suggestion by some that Twitter’s scaling problems result from its choice of the Ruby on Rails programming platform. Read the story.
Study reveals top five words on Twitter, interesting trends
New media blog ReadWriteWeb teamed up with search engine Summize to study who exactly is on Twitter and what they tweet. One interesting finding: Five percent of all tweets are produced by the top 100 active accounts, and many of these are not people, but rather feed bots, like the one we use at Twitter Gossip.
The top five words people send on twitter? “Test,” “lol,” “working,” a smiley emoticon, and “sleeping.” They also found “that there are three main types of conversations going on.” First are status messages like “going to sleep.” Second there are short-term memes like an episode of a TV show or the death of a celebrity. Finally are long-term memes like the presidential race. Read the story.
MySpace to make profiles, friends portable to Twitter
MySpace has announced a new data portability initiative that will allow its users to easily use their profile on other sites, including Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. “One neat trick is that any time you update your photo or other information on MySpace it will instantly be updated on the sites on which you placed the data.” While the feature will not be available for weeks, and details are still sketchy, it seems like users will also have the ability to export “friends” from MySpace to other services. This would make it easy for users to take their social network with them from service to service. Read the story.
Twitter to shut down spammy accounts
Twitter has announced that it will begin to shut down the accounts of users that they believe are generating spam, reports Jesse Stay. “Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as ’spam’, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them … Today, Alex Payne confirmed on the Twitter Dev mailing list that from now on users marked as Spam on Twitter will have their accounts suspended entirely for violating the Terms of Service.” Read the story.
Wikipedia defines spam as “the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages.” On Twitter you must choose to follow a user before that user can send you any messages. As a result, there’s really no such thing as an “unsolicited message” on the service. So, what counts as spam on Twitter?
Twitter down more often than any social network
New research from internet monitoring service Pingdom reveals that “Twitter was down more than any of the other surveyed social networks for the first four months of the year – 37 hours, 16 minutes, meaning it was up 98.72% of the time. That was almost double the downtime of the second worst performing network, Reunion.com.” While 98.72% doesn’t sound too bad, it goes to show that anything less than “five nines” of uptime will leave users feeling like a service in unreliable. Read the story.
Winer: Twitter must be decentralized
Over the weekend, RSS guru Dave Winer (@davewiner) has begun a project to create a decentralized backup to Twitter. Every time Twitter goes down (an all-too-frequent occurrence) it leaves us all stranded, with no easy way to get back in touch. Winer has proposed that users not only send their tweets to Twitter, but also publish them to an alternate RSS feed. If Twitter ever went down, you could pull tweets from the RSS feeds of those you follow–rather than from the Twitter service–and your followers could pull from your alternate RSS feed, which you would continue to update.
But once you’ve gone this far, why stop there? Why should microblogging be centralized at Twitter? If a microblogging standard could be developed, you’d never have scaling problems and third parties could supply the rest of the Twitter service, including SMS features and interesting presentations. More importantly, Winer argues, you wouldn’t have the wonderful network that’s been built resting on a single failure point. Read the story.
What do you think? Does a push to a decentralized standard make sense?
Twitter dumping Ruby on Rails?
Shortly after eWeek published an article arguing that “Twitter’s reliance on Ruby and Ruby on Rails proves the language’s resilience,” newsbreaker TechCruch reported that “After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java[.]” For non-geeks: Ruby on Rails is a way to write applications in a fast and easy manner, and the system has a devoted following. However, there have always been questions about whether a Rails application could scale to handle millions of users. Twitter’s hiccups have Rails’ devotees and detractors in a tizzy. Read the story.
Twitter Gossip is a daily round-up of the latest news and opinion about Twitter compiled by