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.