A proposal for Twitter: Shut it down

As I write this, Amazon.com, like Twitter, is offline. Amazon's outage is the big news Friday morning. But what of Twitter?

I used to love Twitter. But the site's pogo status--it's up! it's down! it's up again!--is driving me away. I've removed the Twitter sidebar from the Webware home page, and I've stopped religiously updating it. Because I figure its users, and my followers, are learning to not trust it, to not bother visiting the site since it's likely to be down when they visit. Chances are fewer people are reading my Twitter posts now than a month ago.

I believe Twitter is bleeding users. Every time Twitter users go to Twitter.com or to their Twitter app and they see the "Fail Whale," an error message, or just a non-responsive site, they're that much less likely to come back the next time. Instead, they're going to FriendFeed, Jaiku, Pownce, or even the whacked-out Plurk.

Until the Twitter team can get the service working again for good, here's what they should strongly consider: Close the site. Take it offline. Put plywood over the doors and windows, as it were, with a big "We're remodeling!" sign on the front. Ask users if they want to be e-mailed when the site reopens for business and don't send that e-mail until the thing is fixed. Really fixed. Then have a grand reopening party.

It's not like doing this would cost Twitter revenue. It doesn't have any. But if Twitter is going to be online, it needs to be reliable. Twitter is not just a toy. It's a communications platform that people were just beginning to rely on before it overloaded and got flakey. Now, no one can rely on it and we're learning that at any given moment, there's a very good chance that Twitter will be offline. The more people who learn that, the fewer people will visit, and the more people will walk across the street to competing services. Remember how Friendster lost its momentum?

If Twitter can't deliver a reliable experience, I think its best bet is to close until it can. That way, we can all come back to the site at the same time, all together, instead of each of us showing up one by one and finding it deserted.

Related: Disqus' Downtime Reminds Us of Woes for Data In the Cloud, by Louis Gray.

[aintnolai]

couldn't disagree more. yes, the up and down nature of twitter is not the best, but the community on twitter is just too critical-mass for people to give up. they'll put up with it alot longer than you can imagine.

Back in the late 90's ICQ had the same reliability problem, and IM is much more time critical than twitter. But they survived. Twitter is has better uptime than ICQ at the time and its model tolerates more downtime.

now if scoble, calacanis and others start moving en masse to somewhere else, maybe that'll change. until then, don't count on it.

and to shutter a web site until they get it right? please, that's your frustration talking.

[britneymason]

Rafe: Im with you. Hey so they shut down for a few days, maybe a week. They come back up they have it under control. I think we can all survive a few days without twitter, heck we do already. With a good online community manager and PR they can spin the whole thing to be all about us the users and our experience.

[sfpeter]

I disagree. Twitter availability problems might drive away some users, but taking twitter down for extended time to fix the problems is guaranteed to drive away many more Twitter junkies. They'll be flocking to competitors and if they're set up over there with their new social network and they're happy, they will see no reason to come back to Twitter when it reopens its doors.

[Ethan_Baker]

3:42 - TWIITER DOWN!!! (again)

[seamus.condron]

Twitter better shape up,or else. http://www.seamus2oh.com/2008/06/twitter-goes-do.html

[sc456a]

I disagree with you Rafe. Simply put, if they take Twitter down because of the high load issues, how are they supposed to test their fixes? If they "close up shop", no one will be using it - thus the load disappears making testing impossible. They do need to get their act together, but shutting down to troubleshoot this sort of problem won't help them resolve it faster.

[JayMonster]

Like I said on the Cnet version of this... this makes as much sense as "Nobody goes to that restaurant any more because it is too crowded"

If "everybody" is leaving... the scaling problems would fix themselves... now wouldn't they?

[digiSal]

see you on jaiku http://digisal.jaiku.com hit me for an invite if you need one digisal at gmail dot com

[The Harper]

To sc456a: I am hoping that Twitter has a way to do Perf/scalability/load testing prior to pushing changes & enhancements to production! That is what QA, Integration, and Performance environments are for. Users shouldn't be the first ones to test the robustness and stability of a non-Beta feature or site, -ever-. If Twitter was not designed to handle the current traffic loads, their fix(es) to that problem should be vetted out in a non-Prod environment first. Of course, unless Twitter is one of these stereotypical, "We don't need to stinkin' QA team! Our Devs can poke around with stuff and make sure it works!" shops, in which case they deserve what's comin' to 'em!

[svk1069]

If Google could get Jaiku relaunched soon, I think there would be a steady exodus of people from Twitter to Jaiku. I know they are moving Jaiku to the Google App Engine, so maybe that's the hold-up. I don't understand why they still are keeping locked up.

I love Plurk, but a lot of people either love it or hate it. It would be harder to convince my friends to go there.

Pownce is struggling with reliability issues of their own. They may not go down, but their site can be damn slow at times.

[someguy999]

I like the restaurant analogy, but they've got it wrong. Its not becuase its too crowded, its becuase they've closed the door and refuse to let anyone in.

I call bs on ICQ, I used back in the 90s and it worked.

At the end of the day while people may have the worlds best business plan, if you can't keep your service up... you really should be asking yourself if you should be running the technical aspects of the service or whether users would be better served with your business plan on somebody elses servers/infrastructure...

[utilitycart]

"Chances are fewer people are reading my Twitter posts..."
Wah, wah, wah.
What a cry-baby.

[vchhahira]

from Plurk just now..."Plurk is getting new shoes (???). Plurk is currently under routine maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience. The upgrade should be complete by 10pm EDT, Friday, June 6. "

[timothysykes]

boo hoo, quit your whining, this is no different than AOL being busy back when they first started. supply demand baby, deal with it, u know it's only gonna get better

Tim
http://www.timothysykes.com

[kmbourke]

Totally agree, Rafe. I've been using it less and less, simply because it's either down, not streaming my feeds (I've missed so many tweets directed to me simply because they never showed up in my feed), or because its down -- constantly. What started as an important tool for me, is crumbling before my eyes. Fact is, there are many other places online to meet and communicate with my network.

It was fun while it lasted...

[ferretboy88]

You have followers? I still can't get past that.

[thatchman1]

Would you recommend the same thing to an Airline? Walmart? Gas stations with buggy authorization systems? I've been the loudest frustrated Twittter user I know, however, I don't agree with shutting it down. Think of this from an internal business perspective-- could we afford to shut down our bar coding system or the accounting system if it wacks out? Maybe.

I do think they should stop accepting new sign ups, however, and I've been happier with their uptime choice of limiting API usage and viewing past tweets.

They need a management change or to be bought out by a big name with distributed database experience-- not shut down.

[UberRob]

Rafe -

Sorry dude, this is not a realistic option - especially after taking in $15M-$20M to date....but even if they didn't, its not a realistic option. The unconfirmed twitter user base maybe under 3M, but it is a very important 3M - the twitterati are the digerati, and the system is used for everything from whining about daily life, to tech and business tips and info. The service is too valuable to close and too ripe for monetization (even if the folks at Twitter can't figure it out - some of us can...and it doesn't involve slapping ads up or charging for access).

The baby-with-the-bathwater approach is overly dramatic - Twitter needs an overhaul, absolutely, and they NEED to get off of Ruby. (Oh, calm down Ruby-people, I work with this thing every day, I'm very aware of what it can and cannot do - and it cannot do scale.) Twitter works as proof of concept, and it now has main-media name recognition. Get a tech team in there that can deal, get an exec team in there that can stop pointing fingers, put Twitter back on the road and lets move on. It's not going anywhere...

[awilensky]

I still cant see why some potential competitor hasn't cloned the service; there is no IP, no patents.

It also seems that the downtime is semi intentional http://bizcast.typepad.com/clients/2008/05/twitter-downtim.html

[andrew.mager]

I feel the same way about Twitter. It's so valuable, but it's not reliable.

I wonder if they shut down for a few weeks, reopen the site, and then discover that all their users have migrated to Plurk or Friendfeed.

Great rant. When will raferants.org open up?