James Burgess

It can’t have escaped your notice (if you’re a Twitter’er), that the back-end of Twitter blatantly sucks. Now, I’ve heard all about them moving to a new architecture, and that’s needed, but the service being provided at the moment is incredibly shoddy.

Over the past few weeks, a large number of different things were disabled on Twitter. A week or so ago, IM updates were disabled for 3-4 days; earlier this week, Jabber updates were disabled; and today, even pagination (of your feed) is disabled… as well as IM (again). What on Earth are Twitter playing at?

Twitter Without Pagination!

I like Twitter - I’ll let that be known. I enjoy using it to keep up to date with friends, and even some aspects of news, just as much as I enjoy using it for my own status updates. There is, however, one thing I can’t stand - this lack of reliability. Surely the folks behind this ‘innovative’ service have figured out that too much load = bad? But instead of disabling things like custom backgrounds, lots of little pictures, etc. they disable key features like pagination and IM Twittering.

On top of all of this “feature X disabled” issues, the general service is appalling. Even with (seemingly) everything disabled, my connection to twitter.com frequently times out or just plain won’t load. These periods of “downtime” last for anything from 5 minutes to 2 days (and 5 days in 2007). You’d have thought they’d have solved the issues by now - especially considering they’ve been around for over a year and a half.

I’m sure everyone will tell me that the huge growth of Twitter is causing the developers problems - and I’m sure it is - but continuing to accept that huge growth, whilst not expanding your architecture enough to meet demand, is a rookie mistake.

What should Twitter do, then? Simple - disable things.

Okay, I hear you, I’m complaining about disabled features and recommending disabling features to solve the problem? That’s exactly what I’m doing - but how about disabling non-key features, like profile images, or those funky backgrounds (as I said above), and maybe even (shock-horror) new registrations? Taking away key features like pagination and IM Twittering just isn’t the way to solve your architecture problems.

At the end of the day, there’s no substitute for actually doing the job properly. Twitter needs a new architecture to cope with the growth - but until it actually makes that move, the guys over at our favourite micro-blogging site need to arrest the growth, and give their current users some level of (working) service.