The Outsidr

While droves of Twitterers continue to be greeted each day with downtime, overload errors and so on, I’ve come up with a conspiracy theory. Twitter isn’t being fixed because Twitter isn’t broken.

The above graph shows Twitter’s people count courtesy of Compete.com. Compete is not entirely accurate of course but I typically find it to be low if anything. What I find most amusing about this graph is that it not only represents Twitter’s traffic but it is also likely a fairly accurate representation of Twitter’s downtime. Now I don’t track all of Twitter’s downtime but I am a light Twitter user and I would say I found last month to be the worst month yet for Twitter’s service in terms of downtime, errors and the like.

Approximate people count according to Compete.com in March and April 2008 , respectively: 1.175M and 1.5M. People count in May 2008: 1,725,977.

How about we have a look at Twitter compared to some more stable products? While Friendfeed and Pownce are not necessarily direct competitors of Twitter (well, Pownce probably is), we’re in the right ballpark.

What? Twitter is an internet service travesty and it is growing like wildfire while the infinitely-more stable Friendfeed and Pownce offerings aren’t seeing anywhere near that kind of growth. Friendfeed is growing at a much slower rate and Pownce is essentially flat. What is going on here?

Any press is good press.

Every time Twitter goes down, the internet lights up with Twitter press. Techmeme, the Wall Street Journal for tech bloggers, is showered with links to various Twitter coverage. Top bloggers write about it, resulting in 10,000 new articles about Twitter. Most of this coverage is negative of course but what’s so bad about that?

Twitter quite possibly gets more coverage than any other web service and at this point the lion’s share is negative press. Guess what – Twitter is laughing all the way to the bank both literally and figuratively. The completion of a successful new funding round, rapid growth, increased loyalty among users… I could go on and on.

Now I’ll pose a question: If you somehow managed to dodge logic, alter reality and fall into a situation where your biggest asset was downtime, would you fix your service?