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.
What is Twitter in 140 seconds video contest
Video sharing site Seesmic and others are sponsoring the “What is Twitter in 140 seconds video contest.” As the title implies, entrants must create a video explaining Twitter running under 140 seconds—a reference to Twitter’s 140 character limit. Top prize is a new iPhone. Judges include Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur (@loiclemeur) and Twitter institution Wayne Sutton (@waynesutton).
Entries can be submitted via any video sharing site but must be tagged “whatistwitter.” Read the story.


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