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Friday, November 21, 2008

All the news that's fit to tweet.

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  Twitter Gossip rounds up the latest news and opinion about everyone's favorite social media tool. More→

  

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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.

Boycott of Twitter scheduled for tomorrow

Disgruntled Twitter users are planning a boycott of the service tomorrow, May 21st. According to one of the organizers, Andrew Dobrow (@anjrued), he and others have been frustrated with Twitter’s frequent outages. “As a result, a bunch of us Twitter power users were using FriendFeed to discuss a way to hit Twitter where it hurts in order to send a message to the powers that be.” Some like Jennifer Leggio (@mediaphyter) believe the boycott will be self-defeating. “We get what we pay for. Unless those boycotting have made significant financial contributions to the server upkeep of Twitter I really don’t want to hear it from them.” Do you think a boycott of Twitter is constructive or not?

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.

With outages, Twitter headed down the AOL path?

Twitter was on the rocks yesterday, giving visitors code 500 internal server errors. This comes on the heels of a major outage two weeks ago that, to the frustration of many, was barely acknowledged by the company. This time Twitter made an effort an effort to keep users informed on its blog, here and here.

News.com has an excellent essay by Charles Cooper drawing a parallel between Twitter’s troubles and outages suffered by high-flying AOL in the mid-90s. “In August 1996, America Online got in even bigger trouble after going dark for 19 hours.How big a deal was it? Consider this: AOL’s outage was the lead news item on the evening news programs for ABC, NBC, and CBS. If you thought the grumbling about Twitter was bad, remember that AOL back then had more than 5 million subscribers and they were not a happy lot.” Read the story.

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