IsTwitterDown?

[Tigerblade]

Is Twitter Down?

Seeing as Twitter was apparently down for quite some time today, I discovered a site that answers the unspoken question... Is Twitter Down? It's a pretty simple site (maybe a considerable understatement), with either the word "Yes" or "No" dead-center.

Maybe it's unnecessary, maybe someone's already seen this, but I found it interesting today.

On a side note... at what point do people start giving up on Twitter because of its incessant downtimes?

[Jeff]

Yeah, Twitter was down today (again).

I don't use Twitter consistently enough to be bothered by the downtime, nor do I rely on in for business critical communication, so it's really no biggie for me.

There is a lot of talk about the fact that it was originally coded in Ruby on Rails as being a big part of the reason for the ongoing problems with downtime. I believe Twitter is (was?) being completely recoded because of the scalability problems they had (not so much with the Ruby part as the Rails).

And it's up now.

[MrEggsalad]

Twitter seems to have a lot of down time for the kind of site it is.

During the week usually it isn't too bad, but I've noticed lots of problems on the weekends.

[Tigerblade]

And when it's not entirely down, it's still pretty ridiculously slow. Like right now - it's technically up, but took a good five minutes to fully load even on a broadband connection.

They need to get with the program, or they risk mass exodus. There's already talk of a shadow program that would mimic Twitter but be open-source and highly distributed so that there's little chance of downtime.

[Jeff]

I think Twitter as a concept is interesting, but I don't think the idea has "legs." Eventually, the capability will be absorbed or available in so many different ways that Twitter itself will become irrelevant.

[David]

Originally Posted by Jeff

I think Twitter as a concept is interesting, but I don't think the idea has "legs." Eventually, the capability will be absorbed or available in so many different ways that Twitter itself will become irrelevant.

The only way twitter can survive is to build it into something that is more flexible. Being able to tweet from more applications, and to be able to do more with the data... otherwise it'll become useless. I'm still somewhat annoyed there isn't a tweet via email option.

[David]

Actually, now that twitter is down, it says "Of course," not "yes."