There are more problems at Twitter, where a series of minor but annoying problems have meant that users can't update their profiles today and couldn't follow or unfollow people on Sunday. So is this the begining of some major collapse, an extension of those well-documented problems in June or just a hiccup?
Photo by Jon Bishop (spazcer) on Flickr. Some rights reserved
In truth, Twitter's downtime and the faults with various features are pretty minor, given the scale of the site now. The technical dynamics of Twitter are uniquely demanding. No two users have the same set up - we all follow and are followed by different groups of people, meaning the demands of serving an audience of 190 million posting 65 million tweets per day.
Twitter chief operating officer Dick Costolo said at an advertising conference last month: "We're laying down track as fast as we can in front of the train" - a rather charming analogy but it does hit the nail on the head.
Because of the very vocal nature of Twitter's userbase, any problem is instantly and disproportionately amplified across the network. Take the Fail Whale as an example of that; a cute error page transformed into a web celebrity.
Twitter also responds to problems promptly and openly, which should be credited. There's a status blog as well as the main Twitter blog and multiple corporate accounts. Could you imagine Apple managing its antennagate crisis this way?
All that said, we have asked Twitter for an official, updated explanation of exactly what is going on.
In the meantime, we can mull the impact of the newly rolled out Earlybird idea, which offers money off and discounts to followers of @earlybird.
It's one of a series of trials in generating revenue for the site says GigaOm, who also points to the strategy of selling Google and Microsoft access to its data through the API. Econsultancy also points to the company's trial and error strategy when it comes to finding money-making models, but that's exactly how it should be working this out, of course.
