Twitter Down! Scoble’s Knickers in Knots!
OK, I like Twitter a lot, but what is up with all this tech news coverage of its outages?
With the Twitter service being glitchy all weekend, for example, the jump-to-the-next-big-thing champ Robert Scoble wrote another piece yesterday smacking his old amour and praising his new love: FriendFeed.
You know, the new pretty young thing in Silicon Valley (ex-Googlers involved make it hotter still!).
You don’t know?
Neither does most of the human race, in truth, which is just getting around to noticing Facebook and maybe, just maybe, figuring out how to properly use a SuperPoke (my advice: never ever!).
And, while Twitter is amazing in many ways, its tech glitches don’t deserve this level of emergency alarms.
But that has not stopped the echo chamber of Silicon Valley from making a lot of really noisy noise about the indignity of it all.
Isn’t there a recent Sarah Lacy interview with some random Web 2.0 player they could egregiously overreact to instead?
In a weird way, though, this reminds me of the outrage when AOL (TWX) went down for 19 hours in August of 1996. (To date myself, I was actually at AOL HQ in Virginia at that very time with CEO Steve Case, working on my first book.)
At the time, AOL’s 6.3 million users had their first collective digital nervous breakdown and the outage resulted in national headlines–as well as later governmental investigations–across the nation.
“If this (outage) is a sign that AOL can’t handle its growth, that’s a very bad message for the professionals that use it,” Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, said ominously to CNN at the time.
Now, 6.3 million users over a decade ago in today’s terms is a lot more in comparison to Twitter’s current users.
But the difference: Today, one single person like Scoble can tweet louder than millions can complain and it sounds like it is exactly the same thing.
Comments
You are on to something here Kara. Like much of the blogosphere there is a lot of preaching to the choir going on, and everyone has a megaphone. It’s not just about monetizing all those 1s and 0s, is it? Doesn’t value matter?
Posted by Tom Swartwood at April 22nd, 2008 at 8:36 amThe problem isn’t that Twitter went down over the weekend, it is the conistancy with which it goes down, breaks, or whatever. It goes down on average once a month and it’s usually not a pretty sight when it does.
Posted by Michael Koby at April 22nd, 2008 at 9:02 amNot to mention the fact that AOL added on, what, another 20 million paying customers in the years AFTER that outage?
Posted by Charlie O'Donnell at April 22nd, 2008 at 11:44 am