I really don’t use Twitter much at all. It’s one of those things, like Facebook, that I just signed up to more-or-less on a whim. But with all the stability and performance problems they’ve been having recently (and the flak they’ve been taking in the press, I understand) I’m hoping that they pull through. You have to wonder though, when their Status Blog gets a post entitled “Odd whales”…
Odd whales
We're seeing a number of whales pop up around the site, especially on profile pages. We're aware of the issue and working on it now.
Update: site back up and mostly whale free.
Bizarre — but maybe if I was a more regular user it would make more sense. 😉
Unfortunately my visibility of their problems started when they shut off their IM functionality — unfortunate because at around the same time I had done an upgrade of my Jabber server and blamed the upgrade for not being able to connect to Twitter. Hours of fruitless config checking and Googling finally led me to the aforementioned Twitter Status Blog and the news that IM had been disabled. Ever since then (two or three weeks ago) IM function has been the “number one priority to get restored”…
I’m not complaining. It’s a service I barely use, and one I’ve never paid for. I can appreciate people getting upset however; as someone who does have trouble keeping in touch with friends and family, if I had gotten more used to it I’m sure I’d be one of those complaining.
Doom-and-gloom time… Part of the flak Twitter has been copping is around the design of their systems (virtually no redundancy or scalability) — if this is systemic to Web 2.0 startups and the investors and venture-capitalists catch on, things could get ugly FAST. Are we set for a repeat of Dot-Bomb? Could Twitter be the first victim of an impending burst of the Web 2.0 bubble?
I hope it comes back. Twitter is a nice way to see what folks are doing, and it’s a reminder of the fact that there are people out there. 🙂 Perhaps I’ll even make a bit more use of it, if it can get its IM groove back on. Good luck folks, and watch out for the whales…
Crossed Wires 