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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.
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.
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