Podcasters' Emporium

It’s not new news that Twitter is having technical issues with their platform, and they have been happening for a while now.

What was interesting this week was a blog post directly from Twitter pointing the finger at ‘power users’ multiple posts in succession as one of the ‘events’ that caused Twitter to go down.

Now, while it’s good that Twitter are actually talking about the problem, I’m not sure the positioning of the message was ideal on this occasion.

While twitter going down when power users post is a symptom of the problem it is not the root-cause. To name power users in association with a problem associates them with the cause of the problem. Power users are not the problem. Perhaps someone in dev at twitter forgot that the customer is always right?

It’s widely discussed that the architecture of twitter is not handling the level of activity generated by it’s massive uptake in recent months, so I can’t understand how anyone at Twitter could have thought that pointing the finger at power users was a good idea.

The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when “popular” users -
that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they’re following -
perform a number of actions in rapid succession.

I don’t blame Scoble for his outburst.

Some might argue that twitter even deserved the wrath of one of their most influential users. The winners in all of this could only be friendfeed who likely picked up a whole raft of new users as a result of his post.

I wonder whether twitter anticipated the backlash of their recent post. Who in twitter PR let this one through the gates. Were twitter – in fact – hoping that some of the users would depart to friendfeed to take pressure off their system?

These are all interesting questions to me.

Only time will tell whether twitter get their technical issues sorted out. With $15M in venture funding one would hope this will be possible. I’m sure that their technical people are working under intense pressure to get a scalable architecture in place.

In the meantime they need to ensure they engage their users (customers) positively, continue to acknowledge the frustration honestly and keep their hands firmly in their pockets to ensure that this type of finger pointing doesn’t happen again.

As for me, I still love twitter… warts and all.