This post will probably be written by a lot of people in the wake of the last Twitter downtime today, but I have some thoughts so here it is. I was at the dentist waiting trying to figure out what was the culprit, the AT&T Edge network or Twitter itself.
First of all, there is not one mention of the downtime on the Twitter blog. At the very least, they should keep their users, paying or not, apprised of the situation. Even if it is after the fact.
UPDATE: I was wrong their was a post on their support site. HERE
That being said, we continue to see day in and day out how Twitter is going to revolutionize a lot of things. Anything from personal relationships to PR/Marketing, and all things in between. I have readily agreed, until now. We need to all start caveatting these predictions, and the caveat needs to be the pure fact that twitter may not be technically able to support this revolution. We recently saw a Techcrunch post on the amount of Twitter downtime and how it has grown. Below is the graph they used to examine the numbers.
As you can see, downtime continues to grow, and the user base grows in unison. There is no possible way users can use Twitter as a solid business tool with outages in the middle of the day. Until it becomes a viable 99999 web service, like a mission critical Oracle database, it can only be thought of as a novelty or a pastime that we are using for some benefit. And that may be fine for most of us. But there are people touting the possibilities, me being one of them until I thought better of it today, and it may not be a reality.
I am not even really too sure about the business model Twitter is following. I see no ads or real revenue source for them, so I am curious what there future plans may be. I did see they recently raised $5.4 million round of funding. When they started this idea, do you think they ever thought it would have enjoyed this success and used in so many different ways ?
UPDATE: Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks has reposted “Twitter Down Again — 10 Ways To Deal With Twitter’s 12-Hour Outage on Saturday” Kind of like “Break Glass In Case Of Emergency.
UPDATE2: Allen Stern has another great post on Twitter and its “business model”, all good questions: Is Twiiter F’ed
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I’ve been trying to figure out how Twitter will be making money too. I’ve bought advertising before and I don’t see how to nail these guys down. Some are suggesting putting a ad on every 20 or so tweets one receives. That’s based on individual volume.
They one has to question who the individual is that would be getting the ad. How can they target ads? Will they notice them? What’s the right frequency?
I don’t see a practical models from the suggestions I’ve seen. And if they’ve got outage problems, then they’ll have accountability problems.