More Growing Pains for Twitter
On the heels of a massive increase in the amount of spam being served up, a major outage over the weekend is making it apparent that Twitter has a lot of growing up to do.
It’s not hard to imagine this would happen with the extreme growth of the micro-blogging site with so many people following huge numbers of tweets, and word-of-mouth leading to tons of new members every day. The issues may or may not have led to the exit of Twitter’s chief architect, Blaine Cook, a couple of weeks ago. Cook was the man in charge of scaling Twitter and had on previous occasions remarked about how simple it was.
With frequent outages and delays becoming common on the service, he obviously wasn’t getting the job done. Twitter has in turn hired some new scaling talent over the last week in an attempt to deal with the rapid growth.
To be fair to Twitter, they aren’t really monetized at this point. Besides some ads being up in Japan, they aren’t bringing in the kind of revenue to easily fix issues.
There’s a big question about the ability of Rails, Twitter’s platform, to deal with scaling and big growth in a site. Many are commenting that while Rails is easy to work with and does a great job at setting up a site fast, in the long run, scaling problems come back to haunt developers. Whether or not this is the case is open to interpretation, but there is some chatter about that.
To add insult to injury, users of the new GroupTweet app were having their private messages displayed for all to see. Hopefully, that didn’t ruin any relationships. Currently, the developer of GroupTweet has shut down new registrations while the problem gets sorted out.
Thanks to TechCrunch and Michael Arrington for the info.
Technorati Tags: twitter, blaine cook, grouptweet, social media
