Twitter has come under attack for being a great service that has a poor record of up time Link1 – TechCrunch, Link 2 – TechCrunch. Well news on the street is Twitter survived the several thousand posts it recieved during WWDC, including my own meager posts. But at what cost.
I laughingly joked that the next feature for twitter to disable to ensure it stayed up, was to turn off twittering. In reality it was nearly at that point the following features were cut for the duration of the Keynote:
- @ Replies
- Everyone Tab
- Archive Tab
- Public Timeline
- Limit number of API requests from 30 Request Per Hour to 10
- Updates by SMS
- User Deletion and Restoration
It seems to me that the vast majority of the functionality of twitter was culled to ensure uptime, the community was just lobotomised with no thought. I applaud twitter for staying online, but it shouldn’t have cost the features that make Twitter, Twitter and not just some meta-blogging platform.
Twitter has got plenty of issues with scaling, if anything WWDC has proved that twitter cannot scale with demand. To use a analogy, a TV station does not cut the commentary of a football match because the system cannot cope with the demand, this is essentially what Twitter did to the community.
It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up! Only one unexpected disruption occured and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service distruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote. With that single distruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%
I love Twitter, and despite the fact I don’t really get it yet. I don’t want to see it disappear because it couldn’t handle its popularity.
Huh? Broadcast television is a lousy analogy – the word ‘broadcast’ gives it away – everyone gets the exact same thing. If I want to watch something different from my neighbor I need another broadcast station to give it to me. Which isn’t practical if everyone wanted to watch something completely different from their neighbors (which twitter allows).
A better analogy might be the phone system after an earthquake – not everyone will be able to get through at the same time – so you’re encouraged to should stay off the phone unless its something life-threatening. Twitter, in this case, is better than the phone system – they can turn off that parts that are lower priority and allow more of the high-priority tweets. If I can’t sign up for a twitter account right after and earthquake I don’t mind – but if I can’t send a tweet that a building is collapsed around me then I would be really upset. WWDC is like a predicted-earthquake: twitter proactively shifted priorities. Good job guys!
The point I was really trying to make was Twitter shouldn’t have to take these features off, to ensure there systems stay up. I could cope with a couple as you said with the phone system, such as disabling deletion and creation of user accounts. But @ replies and tabs, why?
Just because a site is popular its still no excuse to have to take major functionality for the sake of uptime.