6 comments

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  Joe Grossberg

  1 year ago

  It's not scaling that's the problem, it's uptime.
  
  Subtle difference, and surely some overlap in Twitter's case, but a common mistake in assessing Twitter's woes.
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  Peter Koning (on Facebook)

  1 year ago

  I bet they're sitting around the servers every morning at 10am watching the load meter go up and thinking "omg please don't hit our max again" and "maybe we should reduce the 140 char limit to 120" and "oh nooo someone just told 10,000 more people about twitter" :)
  
  They should take a page from the 37signals book and design the system's economics so that they are more than happy to take on more tweeters and scale up accordingly...
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  Joe Wheeler

  1 year ago

  Totally agree.
  
  I think it's a combination of a few things and now that the B round is closed, it should (has to) get better.
  
  The very nature of raising money is extremely time consuming and mentally exhausting. I'm not taking anything away from Jack or Evan, but I think they (and their investors) would agree their time and energy would be better off spent on running Twitter instead of drowning in the "deal".
  
  So I think the chronology of events makes sense. Jack and Ev were distracted to get the deal done, traffic continued to grow, which caused reduced attention to scale and performance and the site sucked. Which it did/does.
  
  Notice. The deal was done last night and Jack made a post about downtime. Interesting timing.
  
  What surprises me a little is that Fred and Albert at Union Square Ventures didn't step in a little earlier than they did to give a boost. I know all of that takes time to put together, and they have probably been working on it a long time, but I think it was a little late. I think the majority of heavy Twitter users would also agree.
  
  At the same time, I'm really not worried at all about their business, their business model, or their uptime at this point. Why? Because I know that Union Square is behind them, and now the rumor is that Bijan and his crew at Spark Capital led this B round with USV. It makes sense; both of those companies have very solid portfolios, know what they are doing, and have been in the game for a while.
  
  Now that the round is done, I think we'll see at least one or two top notch engineers join Twitter to help them grow (the right way).
  
  Cudos to the Twitter team, Union Square, and Spark (I think)
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• 

  Pete

  1 year ago

  I believe Twitter is suffering from its all too much praised "fail fast and cheap" approach.
  
  The application itself is actually not that complex (check the Slashdot threads on those issues). By applying a generative process (RoR and MySQL) the application was shifting too much of the load balancing and scalability issues away from the database to a higher, persistence level. This is simply engineering architecture malpractice at its best. I wish people would shift away from blaming RoR and actually identify the underlying problem.
  
  I have seen similar things happen over and over again: the misperception that the LAMP stack is a sustainable platform and ready for abnormal growth rates is proven wrong by Facebook as well.
  
  I simply believe that this is an architectural problem that roots in an excitement for a new technology. Don't get me wrong: it's great they tried, but at some point you should better stick with best practices or it will become very costly.
  
  It would be sad to see a great idea like Twitter die because some people fell for some nice marketing speeches.
  
  Here's my advice: get an architect who knows best practices inside out and implement the new system design instead of just fixing the symptoms.
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  David Mullings

  1 year ago

  You left out the idea of an acquisition by a bigger company that already has engineering minds. The VCs do eventually want their money + a return.
  
  If scaling is not the problem, and just uptime, a freemium approach would make sense - free twitter accounts get x messages per month and paid members get x+y messages. That revenue can then go towards improving uptime (and scaling if needed).
  
  The question is whether they think that they now have enough users to introduced paid services. Twitter is not exactly mainstream, mainly popular among the "digerati" in my opinion.
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  Mike Josephson

  1 year ago

  Twitter has quickly gained critical mass. I can't imagine they could have anticipated the sustained viral growth rate. As a developer, I have been involved in scenarios where the design of an app did not perfectly fit the business logic or demand in some aspect. When this occurs you have two choices: 1) re-write the app from the ground up utilizing the wisdom gained from the actual use/case. 2) Patch.
  Choice 1 is more expensive in terms resources short term but pays dividends long term. Choice 2 is faster to market and less expensive but over time serves to compromise the app.
  
  I believe Twitter could manage a re-write by keeping the existing service running as "gimped" with patches and maintain their user base by being upfront about the new release plans and involving the community in the design process. With some VC they could sandbox the new application until ready for prime time!
  I would like to be first in line by proposing they build into the new release an implementation which supports "read" flag which can be permanently set and supported in the API.
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