Read at Joe’s

People are blogging and commenting on Twitter’s blog about Twitter’s current degraded service status. I will admit to being torn about this. Being a developer myself, I know the kinds of strange and inscrutable things computer systems will do for no apparent reason. I myself have a website that I haven’t done much with lately, and which has its own set of issues which include no-apparent-reason failures. Try the same thing an hour later, and everything’s fine. So I really do understand and empathize with Twitter’s small band of developers and system engineers that try their best to keep the beast running smoothly.

There is a difference, however, between their situation and mine. I’m a single person, with some borrowed time on a shared hosting account, with no money to throw at the problem, although I do have time. Twitter has received several million dollars in venture financing, and while a not-insignifcant part of that goes to simply server, bandwidth and SMS service fees (which can be substantial), there’s still a lot left there to hire someone who can scale up a web-site. It’s not really uncharted territory. There are innumerable sites out there that carry tons more traffic than Twitter. Why can’t Twitter do it, then? The answer that comes to mind is that their management, or more likely their investors are not willing to spend the money on new hires or consulting hours to get to the bottom of their issues and fix them.

That said, I still have empathy for the people who are doing what amounts to rebuilding the engine and drivetrain of a car while it’s roaring down the highway at maximum speed. It’s a hard task, for sure. I just hope the management and investors are taking this seriously, and giving those engineers the resources they need to get the job done. In my experience, it’s rarely the troops on the ground that are to blame, but rather the people running the place and paying for it.

I don’t disagree with people who say, “what do you want for nothing?” But unless Twitter does something to really fix their performance and stability problems, someone’s going to come out with a service or solution that does fix the problem, and that will be the end of Twitter.