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An informal, stream-of-consciousness reflection on business ideas, events and issues in modern business, modern life and with some specifics to the web-software industry by Paul Tomori, Internet Entrepreneur

Twitter Scaling Hardships By Paul Tomori Friday, June 11, 2010 at 12:33:23 (EDT) "Be careful what you wish for" the saying goes. Success often comes with hardship. Case in point: Have you even tried to visit Twitter.com lately? Not only can I not get into my Twitter accounts, but, I can't even hit on the homepage during business hours. I haven't tried after hours yet, but I suspect it will be mostly the same. Must be nice to have that kind of overwhelming growth. Or is it? The Facebook guys started at roughly the same time as Twitter and they transact more images and video by far, than Twitter, yet they seem to have scaled pretty nicely. No doubt, they suffered some big expense and some sleepless nights trying to keep pace with the exponential growth, but they did it. So, something is wrong at Twitter. Their apparent ability to manage the onslaught of celebrity tweets and hordes of followers is very poor. Certainly, I hope that it is not the Ruby on Rails platform at fault here. I am a big fan of David Hanneimeir Hanson and the dudes at 37 Signals. Or maybe it's the fact that their revenue model came after their service model (generally a bad business decision)... and I was skeptical at first as to the value of Twitter, but am sold on it now. We just need a reliable site or someone will come along and do it better. Return To Blog Index