Archive for the ‘The Problem With’ Category
|The Problem With: Twitter
October 16th, 2008
Twitter’s technical woes have been well documented. Although the seem to have gotten a handle on the issues, with little downtime lately, they have done so at the expense of certain resource intensive features.
There has been much speculation as to the cause of Twitters problems, was Ruby on Rails to blame, or was it just a poorly architected system that would have had problems regardless of how it was implemented?
I don’t think Ruby on Rails was the cause of Twitters problems, any services that grows as fast as Twitter did is bound to have problems. I don’t think Ruby on Rails help either though. Twitter reached Ruby on Rails related performance limits, which are generally lower than with other development platforms, and instead of having the time to rebuild and re-architect their core system they ended up having to focus on short term.
The real problem behind Twitters problem though can be traced back to intended usage. Originally built as part of the Odeo site, a way for members to send updates to each other. Since becoming an independent service, Twitter has morphed into a general purpose messaging platform, where people follow and update thousands of connections. The top twitters users currently have nearly 100K followers, with them most active users have sent over 500K updates. Well beyond the scope of its intended usage.
Even from a user interface viewpoint the was not designed for this, the sidebar of a users homepage at one time listed all the people following you, this has since been changed to show just 36 friends, but demonstrates ways that Twitter has had to change itself as it has grown.
Given the traction that Twitter has, with a very loyal user base, that refused to abandon it during the technical issues it had, Twitter is not going anywhere, and as it rebuilds itself to match how people are using it, I expect Twitter to continue to be a huge success … as long as it can find a way to monetize its users.
Depending on how they do this, it might turn its loyal user base against them.
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