Which dies first – Twitter or Fail Whale?
Twitter’s reliability continues to be spotty. How long are we going to wait for them to sort things out? Or at least publish a plan of attack?
This is getting way past ridiculous. Sometimes it seems like the damned whale will fall out of the sky if you breathe too hard on your screen or click on your mouse too fast.
While announcing two new directors/advisors (including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com), the Twitterers That Be included the following paragraph in their June 24 post on the Twitter blog:
Project: Runway
Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model. However, our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust. Private funding gives us the runway we need to stay focused on the infrastructure that will help our business take flight. We will continue hiring systems engineers, operators, and architects, as well as consultants, scientists, and other professionals to help us realize our vision.
You said it, guys. Twitter must be reliable and robust.
Which it still isn’t. Not yet.
I’m getting just a bit tired of waiting. How about you?
Julian Baldwin:
Didn't you write a post about our expectations of free services? I feel like this post goes against some of the arguments you were making before. Have your opinions changed – do you demand more of a free service?
25 June 2008, 6:26 amMark Dykeman:
D'OH… I certainly did write that post about free services. The thing is, though, that I was led to believe that Twitter had actually been doing work to improve things, but I haven't seen a huge amount of improvement. In that case, my complaint would be more about expectation setting, which would kind of overrule the expectations of a free service. If the vendor gives you an indication of improvement that's forthcoming, regardless of whether or not it's a free service, then they are resetting the expectations.
25 June 2008, 7:15 amRecruitmentNick:
having said how much i prefer plurk elsewhere it has also started playing funny buggers with me.
I prefer plurk as it seems to offer better networking opportunities, but i shall continue playing with both for now
25 June 2008, 10:44 amDewald Pretorius:
Mark, it's understandable that folks would get a bit impatient. However, I'm sure that if it were easy to fix the scalability issues, they would have been fixed already. It's highly complex, and I think they realize they have only one chance to get it right.
If Twitter rushes the fixing and announce to the world they are now scalable, imagine the outcry of anyone sees a fail whale again.
I'd rather be patient (try to be), and give them time to get it right.
25 June 2008, 12:03 pmMark Dykeman:
Plurk is kinda neat, kinda cool, but I'm just not taking to it. I'm on it maybe once/week now.
25 June 2008, 1:10 pmMark Dykeman:
Dewald, I don't disagree with your comments, but it would be nice to have more insight into the process, including steps and timelines. They first got word of $15 million venture capital almost a month ago but other than crippling parts of their service, plus the Fail Whale image, and surviving Apple's WWDC, haven't seen a whole lot of improvement yet.
I agree that they'll shoot themselves in the foot if they set inaccurate expectations, but they should be saying something more substantive, IMHO.
25 June 2008, 1:19 pmJulian Baldwin:
28 June 2008, 7:08 amTwitter is the never-ending fair where a lot of people know your name | Broadcasting Brain:
[...] to the chagrin of some power users) and has done other things behind the scenes and the dreaded Fail Whale is a rare occurrence these days, at least in my [...]
27 October 2008, 7:27 am