Now, me, personally, I don’t use Twitter. Oh, yes, I know, as “new media/blog guy” I’m supposed to be all “hep” to the latest “doo-dads” what with me being one of those crazy “internet geekerinos” but I just never really saw a value in Twitter that wasn’t available with LiveJournal years ago.
One hundred and forty characters is simply not enough room to convey anything particularly complex, informative, or artistic. I mean, even though I read “Burnt Orange Report,” published by Karl-Thomas Mussleman, I must admit that twitter posts like…
“karltm Sitting behind marc katz in traffic. His left rear tire pressure is low. 12:24 PM May 24, 2008 from txt”
…neither inform nor entertain.
Others, like this one from my friend and sometimes improv comedy partner Chris Trew of Coldtowne…
“christrew just ate body paint 19 minutes ago from web”
…are just things you don’t want to know.
For all of its flaws, however, Twitter’s service is something that many professionals – for whatever reason – rely on. Unfortunately, Twitter is not particularly reliable – the constant outages have prompted at least one person to create a Web site called “IsTwitterDown.com” which pings Twitter’s server.
Now , pinging Twitter’s server may indeed help you determine fault – but it won’t tell you anything about the dropped packets, network round trip time, or any of the other performance issues which prevent Twitter from being usable. For example, users experienced degraded service this morning because Twitter’s main database crashed due to too many connections. A quick ping wouldn’t detect “too many connections” – it would just be one of the successful connections of which there were apparently too many.
To Twitter’s credit, they’re well aware of the performance issues and just today have started a blog which details “performance and reliability.” Pagination – whatever that is – is partially restored. (I’m assuming it might have something to do with Ellen Page, the lead actress in “Juno.”)
Mark Gibbs at Network World suggested that IsTwitterDown.com should switch from merely pinging the Twitter server to using cURL and Wget to see if you can send and receive Twitter updates, which would be more accurately measuring the performance of Twitter. Then again, considering that istwitterdown.com is in the same vein as abevigoda.com, which constantly updates “is he dead?” status of Abe Vigoda, that might be taking the joke too far.
Twitter is a victim of its own popularity. With a passionate user base, headlines on CNN, and parodies in The Onion, I’m sure the site has experienced a deluge of traffic and new users. The performance problems have been extremely frustrating for those of us who are using it for business (and a bit of entertainment too – thanks @fireland). I would gladly pay for the service if they could deliver it reliably. Take a look at how we are using it to keep users and press up to date on happenings at BreakingPoint http://www.breakingpointsystems.com.
You don’t want to know what I ate? I’m confused.