When the Tweets Go Out: Downtime and User Expectations

by jordan | April 27, 2008 at 12:23 pm | 164 views | 1 comment

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Last weekend's Twitter downtime has prompted the expected bout of hand-wringing... (I didn't even notice, but evidently many, many others sure did)

• The difference between way AOL grew and some services like Twitter or Meebo is that we integrated a huge audience. We had millions of people online simultaneously and that took a huge investment in computing horsepower to make it all work. When it comes to Web technologies, no one has replicated that sort of scale when AOL was at its prime. But now they're facing that kind of growing pain issues that we had to power through.

• My message to Twitter is no different. We're getting habituated on your service and we're dependent upon it. You can't take the point of view that it's free and downtime is to be expected--not if Twiter wants to keep the loyalty of consumers. You cannot underestimate the importance of being dial tone grade.

• We may accept low quality service cell phones. But when we pick up the phone, we expect a dial tone. When you send e-mail, you expect it will be delivered. So this clearly is something Twitter has to take seriously. If they do go ahead and understand that they need to have a bullet proof back end--and that sort of thing is expensive--they could wind up with the same good news success story. If not, people are going to go to someone else.

User's expectations of performance from a free service are not unforeseen, nor should these expectations be discounted. However, it must be pointed out that AOL was a fee-based service (unless you kept cancelling and reinstalling via those ubiquitous free-month CD-ROMS; I used them as coasters): the more members AOL got, the more money it was bringing in, so their war chest would, in theory, grow with their user base. Twitter, on the other hand, is still living at home with its folks, and has not yet put a revenue plan into action.
Still, Twitter's relatively small user base is made up by those who live a full digital life: the movers and shakers of the tech industry. Looking at my own Twitter connection group, I only see my friends and colleagues who work in the industry at a high level: the ones who make stuff and do stuff: the trendsetters and opinion-makers, if not world- and industry-wide, then at least within their immediate communities. These are the people a company has to make happy, and, fair or not, uptime is crucial to keeping 'em sweet.