Comments on: Which dies first – Twitter or Fail Whale?

By: Twitter is the never-ending fair where a lot of people know your name | Broadcasting Brain

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:27:23 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Julian Baldwin

Julian Baldwin — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:08:35 +0000

By: Mark Dykeman

Mark Dykeman — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:19:42 +0000

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.

By: Mark Dykeman

Mark Dykeman — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:10:32 +0000

Plurk is kinda neat, kinda cool, but I'm just not taking to it. I'm on it maybe once/week now.

By: Dewald Pretorius

Dewald Pretorius — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:03:18 +0000

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.

By: RecruitmentNick

RecruitmentNick — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:44:14 +0000

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

By: Mark Dykeman

Mark Dykeman — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:15:22 +0000

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.

By: Julian Baldwin

Julian Baldwin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:26:04 +0000

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?