Comments on: Is Twitter about to retire the whale?

By: Twitter for MicroISV, CEO or ISV | Avangate Blog - Software Business Blog

Twitter for MicroISV, CEO or ISV | Avangate Blog - Software Business Blog — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:39:08 +0000

[...] 2008 Twitter had more than a few crashes, those issues have been resolved, as this chart from the Royal Pingdom Blog [...]

By: Eric Marden

Eric Marden — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:57:58 +0000

@Evan, what about the missing track and IM features? What effect has that had on making it easier to scale?

By: Pingdom

Pingdom — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:09:08 +0000

@Evan: Thanks for taking the time to comment! (For those who don’t know, he’s one of the founders of Twitter.)

By: Evan Williams

Evan Williams — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:33:20 +0000

Thanks for noticing! We still have a lot to do, but feels like we’re making progress.

To those that are wondering: No, it is not because of lower volume. In August, Twitter saw significantly higher traffic than ever before.

@karthick Not sure what that is; will look into it.

By: Karthick Prabu

Karthick Prabu — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:08:43 +0000

In addition to the ‘whale’ error page, I got another error page while browsing twitter. Refer http://www.kprabu.com/2008/08/twiitercom-error-page.html for the screenshot. Any body else got this error?

By: Ed Shaz

Ed Shaz — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:02:42 +0000

Scott,

The peak Summer vacation season for the US, is
June through August. Essentially, a day after
most children get out of school for Summer break
until school resumes (much of the nation today 9/2).

I believe Twitter will continue to trend upward.
Doomsayers are not looking at the big picture.

The whale can pull a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,
and will fly.

Thanks for your post,
Ed

By: Pingdom

Pingdom — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:43:16 +0000

Thanks for the feedback so far!

@Andrew: Pingdom is a Swedish company, and here in Sweden the main summer holiday period covers late June, July and early August. Twitter isn’t huge in Sweden, though, so US vacation should be a much bigger factor (especially considering the difference in population size…)

Out of curiosity, when is the main summer holiday period in the US? Is that August?

You have a point in that this could be a factor, but the change was sudden enough to lead us to believe that something was done “behind the scenes” at Twitter, i.e. they made something to speed up their website.

@Luke: You may have a point, but the traffic trend to Twitter.com seems to contradict this. It shows a clear, upward trend:
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=twitter.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

By: Andrew Finkle

Andrew Finkle — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:26:57 +0000

This graph also coincides with the summer, historically this is the slowest time of the year for Internet usage. Though I hope that this accurately shows an improvement in infrastructure, the verdict is still out in my opinion. I think there are more important improvements that Twitter can make at this time anyway (as I outlined on my blog).

By: Luke Gedeon

Luke Gedeon — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:12:20 +0000

Is the lower downtime because of lower volume though? Many of the high-volume users have left or scaled back usage, or they have been throttled.

Also without twitter going to IM, I have about forgotten about it. I wonder if the lower downtime is because they are just not cool anymore.