Thursday, May 29, 2008

Twitter ate my hamster

I'm blogging in the style of twitter, for those of you in withdrawal due to it's recent availability issues. Got to stick to 140 char limit

Confused by the title of this post? It refers to a headline in 'The Sun' (UK 'Newspaper') that is so famous in the UK it's a popular phrase

Twitter is a free service. No advertising, no fees, no hidden charges, no taxes, no problem. It is used by free loaders like me (and you?)

@Twitter was down a bit over this weekend, it has disabled some features and limited usage levels on others while it sorts out it's problems

@TechCrunch did a one word blog post during the downtime 'Twitter!' got over 400 comments. Clearly people feel passionately about Twitter.

@mkrigsman blogged about twitter downtimes calling it IT mgmt failure saying ‘many people depend’ on it @dhaimes responded ‘more fool them!’

@twitter should not be burning cash building a bullet proof technical infrastructure to support millions of free loaders, it needs to make $

Bullet Proof infrastructure anyone can do, just hire the experienced people and buy a lot of hardware and software, easy, but it will cost $

The dot-com dead pool is full of wonderful scalable infrastructures, costing a lot of money which owners did not figure out how to pay for.

I used to use, Webvan which built a great infrastructure, had some great technology and spent $1 Billion. It never made a cent and went bust

If 'many people depend' on @twitter, would they all pay to use it? If they guaranteed 99.9999% availability how much would you pay for it?

Did you notice every paragraph is exactly the 140 characters long? One great thing about twitter is it forces people to be much less verbose

8 comments:

Jake said...

Dude, your comments emoticonized my stats, wtf?

Jake said...

Forming my own thoughts into a post, natch, but my quick take is very similar.

Depending on a service run by a company with no business model leads to failure.

Uptime is insanely difficult and therefore expensive. Observe:
99.9% uptime ("3 nines") = 21.9 hours downtime/year
99.99% uptime ("4 nines") = 52.56 minutes/year
99.999% uptime ("5 nines") = 5.26 minutes/year
99.9999% uptime ("6 nines") = 31.54 seconds/year

These are tough to maintain for profit, so why would you try for free?

David Haimes said...

@Jake Fixed the emoticon issue, some wordpress.com option.

I wondered if people would do comments in 140 chars or less, apparently only me.

Tim said...

You get what you pay for, we're not paying! IT mgmnt failure ...wtf!? I have to admit Im converted - its Twitterific http://snurl.com/2bhqf

Jake said...

I tried to comment in 140 characters, but the stats ruined it.

Meg Bear said...

having just joined Twitter in time for it to freak out I wonder if it's me ;-). Boy do I miss Webvan. They rocked!

David Haimes said...

Meg - yes webvan rocked, they had loyal and happy customers and provided excellent and reliable service. It is important to figure out the business model before you spend a billion making customers happy.

My name is David and I used to be a blogger « David Haimes Oracle Intercompany Financials Blog said...

[...] more time pushing out 140 character packets of info on Twitter. I have no problem with Twitter, I blogged about it and hang out there now and then, but for me it is no replacement for blogging. My lack activity [...]