Where is Chris Cocker when you need him, anyway, next time you are on the verge of another jibe at Twitters expense you should bare this in mind. We are the early adopters and some of us are also some of the heaviest users of twitter, some people have literally 10’s of thousands of followers. Some, who are weblebreties, post tweets that attract 30 to 40 responses to every 140 character gem of wisdom is dropped. From what I understand it is the number of @ messages that are makes Twitter a difficult technology to scale. When I see the Fail Whale I just come back later, like others i’ve become rather fond of it.
Being a mega early adopter means having to accept that sometimes things won’t run right. The guys at Twitter are building a technology that has never existed before, and they are doing it while everyone is using it. Talk about building a plane while flying it and transporting passengers, I wish them the best of luck.
Love the fail whale, check out the t-shirts.
Come on man! @replies are not scalable??? That’s a serious cop out. If the Web is so rickity that @replies aren’t scalable, what hope would any other application have? Amazon? Craigslist? eBay? Gmail? YouTube? You’re really saying that @replies are such a massive technical challenge that it’s nearly impossible to make it function over time?
Twitter is simply poorly written.
I don’t buy the idea that this tech is so revolutionary we should sit back for years waiting for them to get it right. This *isn’t* revolutionary stuff, it is/was unique but we’re not inventing e-commerce here.
Yes, we’re early adopters, but how am I supposed to convince the non-early adopters to show up when all they see is 500 errors?
I’m torn on the issues of twitter. I just recently wrote a blog about I still think Twitter is a useful tool, however, I admit to having the exact same concern as Jake… what happens when I tell all my clients to check out Twitter and then can’t even log on? I’m pretty patient with technology but non-early-adopters may be less so.
All in all, I respect Twitter and what they’ve done. I will continue to use them. And, I’ve got to say, I’d rather be over-capacity then lost in the sea of start-up social medias that never get anywhere.
I think I’ll just wait and see if the Twitter team can get their act together. I certainly hope so.
I think it’s false to just compare Twitter to other web sites that are essentially just serving web pages, that’s a well understood technical and architectural problem. It’s taken many years to get web sites set up to a level of reliability where we expect them to be up all the time. Remember the shock of Amazon being down for 2 hours a couple of weeks ago. Twitter is not just serving html pages, in the background they are routing millions of connections between individuals. Also they are doing this on Rails which also provides it’s own unique constraints, so they are pushing the envelope with a new technology there as well. As for convincing non-early adopters, I think the answer to that is easy, don’t, twitter isn’t ready
Maybe that ‘release early release often’ methodology that has been rammed down our throats in the recent Web eras should be looked at again. Perhaps, making ‘beta’ mean what it used to: two or three steps away from final product, and not the cute, touchy-feely marketing term it has become.