Stilgherrian’s links for 23 May 2008 through 24 May 2008, collected almost-automatically…
Continue reading “Links for 23 May 2008 through 24 May 2008”
Heaps o’tweets from ReMIX 08
I’ve been Twittering fairly extensively from ReMIX 08. While it’s easy enough to follow my Twitter feed, you can get a mix of everyone’s tweets from the conference at hashtags.org or Twemes. The second one has all of my tweets.
Who’d be Twitter today?
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.
Twitter flattened by China earthquake, indirectly (not)
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.]
Links for 06 May 2008
Here are the web links I’ve found for 06 May 2008, posted automatically.
Social networks: the Nuclear Option
I’d planned to write something else today, but if I don’t mention this article now then I’ll appear way out of touch. Mark Pesce has just posted another magnificent essay: The Nuclear Option.
It’s a commentary on how Twitter and similar tools which help us create instantaneously-connected global social networks are changing the world. Entertainingly written too, as always — and not just because he mentions me.
I won’t quote it. Just read it. Then make a cup of tea, read it again, and stare out of the window for a while.