Of all the social networks, I remain enamoured with Twitter the most. Its simplicity makes it extremely versatile, both for content distribution and relationship building. I also think it delivers value at a personal level and at the same time can represent brands and businesses.
But one place where Twitter drives me crazy, and has for the past 3+ years, is the lack of systems reliability – a.k.a. the ‘fail whale’ which displays whenever Twitter has exceeded user capacity. If you’ve used Twitter for any period, you not only know what the fail whale is, but expect it to appear! It has become an accepted part of the Twitter experience.
Will they fix it? It’s hard to imagine they will, and if a serious effort is being made, it must be a long term project. The company is now extremely focused on making money, “Promoted Tweets”, and the like. Desperately trying to show they have a business model. Which is all well and good, but shouldn’t the technology itself be rock solid? If the plan is to take the company public, you’d think the delivery technology would at least be an equal priority.
Twitter’s fail whale teaches us that mediocre technology is ok. As I said above, we expect routine systems failure from Twitter. And it’s sad. The days when we would ask of web companies ‘how solid is their technology?‘ or ‘does it scale?‘ seem to be over. If you can create a cool web application, and it works 98% of the time… that’s probably good enough.
And the worst part? I unfortunately and admittedly no longer care. I accept that there will be days when I must refresh the browser window 5 or 6 times, or shut down Tweetdeck and try again in 5 minutes (somewhere, an Engineer dies a little inside because of users like me).
Twitter’s problems won’t arise because of Users though. Really. It’s not my company, so mediocre and good enough aren’t my concern. Investors, on the other hand might eventually decide to nitpick. Perhaps not now, and maybe not even at the IPO, but eventually. Twitter is going to have to compete.
Frankly, it’s a bad call on Twitter’s part not to remedy this situation early and take this unreliability out of the investor equation. It will eventually burn them, because no company is a market darling forever.
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