Comments on: How Twitter Could Crash and Burn

By: djacobs

djacobs — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:34:02 +0000

@yanis
Yes reliability is always an issue, but it shouldn’t be a problem has it is with Twitter.

By: Luke Hoersten

Luke Hoersten — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:59:43 +0000

Twoorl is a cool Erlang twitter clone which is quite simple and very speedy! I hope my friends move there because you don't realize how slow twitter is until you try something else!

By: yanis

yanis — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:23:36 +0000

djacobs,

Twitter has changed and evolved over time – it has moved into short messaging rather than short blogging.

And reliability is *always* an issue at some point for any rapidly growing service.

By: djacobs

djacobs — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:57:23 +0000

Reliability is an issue for Twitter, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be an issue for any competition. In all honesty, it’s a silly issue to have, especially with the technology that’s available, it should have been scalable since day one. Some sort of redundancy should have been set in place, instead of having a single point of failure.

By: NatalieMac

NatalieMac — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:07:48 +0000

Well, using a “serious infrastructure” like Amazon Web Services isn’t going to work – that’s what Twitter is already using.

Twitter and lots of other web services that all go down every time Amazon Web Services go down.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:25:32 +0000

The solution isn’t actually that simple. Twitter isn’t just a short messaging system any more – and folks just aren’t grasping that.

Like the armchair experts claiming to have the answer to all the outage issues, they just don’t take all of the factors into consideration.

It’s API has created an entire sub-culture of applications and tools. If you seek to “replace” twitter then you either have to create the same kind of creative environment, or you risk simply becoming yet another footnote in the “failed competition” office pool.

Sure, Twitter isn’t perfect. Reliability is a real issue – but the solutions to that aren’t simply “more horespower”.

Anyone taking on Twitter needs to thoroughly understand what they have achieved thus far. And that isn’t anywhere on your list.

By: tiffany

tiffany — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:12:46 +0000

keep in mind that many people have accounts on plurk, twitter and pownce. many of my twitter friends are also hardcore pownce users. pownce is where they share files. twitter is where they chitchat.

i think plurk is in a good spot right now. for me, it’s slightly more complex than twitter, but not too much so. i just wish they’d divorce it from the browser and the computer. half of my twitters are SMS on the go.

By: djacobs

djacobs — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:47:08 +0000

I was looking into. The most difficult part is finding a way to make revenue. But as you can easily tell, social networks have a hard time creating revenue. If a site like Twitter claims to get a huge portion of it’s traffic (heard 90%) from it’s API service, it’s going to make it hard to monetize ads.