Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
Who’d be Twitter today? Down again this morning, apparently for the same reason as yesterday. Once is an accident, twice…
As I told them on their own blog, they need to give timely and accurate information so my message to you, Dear Readers, is that Twitter’s problems will soon be over and you can rely on their service — not that they’re a service ripe for cloning by someone with better engineering.
Here are the web links I’ve found for 15 May 2008, posted automatically.
Last night’s episode of Stilgherrian Live Alpha wasn’t recorded. I think my overloaded computer took too long to confirm that I’d pressed the “record” button and I pressed it a second time — turning off the recording. Oops. A shame: there was a solid improvement, but still lessons which could be learned from a review. Still, I’ll review the chat logs and other feedback and post something later.
Internet lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) has expressed “disappointment” at the government’s decision to fund the “clean feed” Internet plan in this week’s budget. They’ve also launched a campaign website at nocleanfeed.com.
“At a time when the Government is cutting services to fight inflation, it’s bewildering that they would decide to spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on a filter before feasibility trials are even complete,” said EFA spokesman Colin Jacobs…
“Australians are very uncomfortable with the idea of having the Government decide what’s appropriate for them and their families,” said Jacobs. “In fact, in a survey of 18,000 Internet users, only 13% agreed with the policy. That’s why we feel it is a shame, when the Government has identified real needs for better education and policing, that their approach to Internet policy is so skewed towards the filter initiative. There are greater risks to Australian children online, and real steps can be taken to mitigate these risks. That’s where the funding should be going.”
Unfortunately EFA made a fundamental mistake which could allow critics to dismiss their arguments. They talk about the Cyber-safety Plan costing $24.3m this financial year and rising to $51.4m next. However only part of this is for Internet filtering. There’s also things which critics could say EFA would support: AFP investigations and plenty of education programs.
While I’ve become a heavy user of Twitter, its main problem is that it’s simply failing to cope with its own rapid growth. Today’s Twitter outage is doubtless caused by a sudden rush of interest following mainstream media coverage in the context of China’s earthquake.
‘Twitters’ beat media in reporting China earthquake, said AFP, and the story ran everywhere. I guess there might be two or three dozen people wanting to know what’s happening in China, maybe even more. Twitter fall down go boom.
Now scaling-up a service like Twitter isn’t easy, I guess. However they compound the problem by failing to provide meaningful information about their outages. People use Twitter for moment-by-moment personal communication — and many of them are the global digerati! When something goes wrong, updates need to happen frequently, and need to contain meaningful information. Perhaps you could use that Internet thing we keep hearing about?
Twitter, you face a grave danger. Someone could replicate your service but with better engineering. You must recover from this outage much better than all previous ones.
[Update 11.10am: Twitter says today’s outage doesn’t have an interesting explanation. “Part of our caching service required an unscheduled restart. That means a slow rebuilding of data.” If so, then their systems architecture needs serious work, I reckon.]
[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh’s cartoons published online, it’s free to use.]
Episode 2 of Stilgherrian Live Alpha is being “recorded live” tonight at 9.30pm Sydney time, though do feel free to arrive early. My good friend and colleague Zern Liew will be joining me from Singapore to talk about his recent visit to China’s three largest cities, amongst other things. I’ve also spoken to Ustream technical support and I think we’ve solved the talkback / co-host problem… fingers crossed!